PHM-Exch> NY Times editorial - Big Tobacco Bullies

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Ellen Shaffer <ershaffer at gmail.com>


Raising the pressure! - Ellen Shaffer


HTTP://WWW.NYTIMES.COM/2013/12/16/OPINION/BIG-TOBACCO-BULLIES.HTML?REF=OPINION&_R=0

 EDITORIAL Big Tobacco Bullies By THE EDITORIAL
BOARD<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/opinion/editorialboard.html>
Published: December 15, 2013

With ever more Americans and Europeans giving up smoking, tobacco companies
have increasingly focused on developing countries as markets for their
addictive and deadly products. Now, as some of those nations try to
regulate cigarettes by, for example, requiring warning labels, Big Tobacco
is using trade and investment agreements to challenge and intimidate them.

Tobacco companies have sued and threatened to sue countries like Uruguay
and Uganda, arguing that their tobacco rules unfairly restrict trade or
hurt their investments, according to a
report<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/health/tobacco-industry-tactics-limit-poorer-nations-smoking-laws.html?hp&pagewanted=all>
in
The Times by Sabrina Tavernise. Namibia has not enforced tobacco
regulations because it is not prepared to fight long and expensive legal
battles against large companies.

Trade agreements and investment treaties, which govern how governments
treat foreigners that invest in their countries, are meant to make it
easier to do business internationally. But they should not serve as means
by which corporations undermine legitimate public health regulations.
Smoking-related illnesses kill nearly six million people a year across the
planet, according to <http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs339/en/> the
World Health Organization. Moreover, the W.H.O. reports that close to 80
percent of the world’s smokers live in low- and middle-income countries.

It is not surprising that tobacco companies would use international trade
and investment agreements to challenge health rules given their historic
opposition to regulations. That is why it’s imperative that trade officials
make clear in treaties that countries cannot be challenged when they are
trying to protect their citizens. The United States is negotiating atrade
agreement <http://www.ustr.gov/tpp> with 11 Pacific Rim countries right
now. American officials have said they plan to include language in that
pact, which could be finalized next year, to protect those nations from
legal challenges by tobacco companies. Those safeguards must be ironclad
and should include provisions to penalize companies that bring frivolous
and harassing lawsuits. Governments around the world should add similar
provisions to existing trade and investment agreements to stop the tobacco
industry’s bullying of sovereign governments.
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