Pakistan: ‘Tobacco Use Killing At Least 300 Every Day’

The high prevalence of tobacco use in the country is killing more than 110,000 people every year, approximately 300 deaths every day.

Pakistan is heading towards a darkening tobacco epidemic era shaped up by 24 million adults aged 15 or above using tobacco on daily basis.  Indicated by statistics, this is one of the highest prevalence of tobacco use in the world. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is the first ever international treaty negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) to which Pakistan is a signatory since 2005, said The Network for Consumer Protection (TNCP), a non-governmental organisation, in its 2017 report issued on Saturday.   FCTC requires the country to implement appropriate price and tax measures to be adopted to reduce the consumption of tobacco products. However, TNCP said that recently Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) succumbed to multinational tobacco company’s pressure and has reportedly approved the draft for 3rd taxation tier for the Pakistan’s tobacco industry.

Multinationals, with an agenda to decrease the price of their own cigarettes, have cleverly duped FBR into accepting the 3rd tier proposal with a false promise that FBR revenues would drastically improve, the report suggested.

The introduction of this 3rd tier is completely antithesis of the FCTC treaty and may expose government of Pakistan to an adverse notice of WHO.

FBR, in hopes of achieving their target revenues, has bargained against the lives of millions of Pakistanis at risk with the introduction of this 3rd tier. Lower price coupled with low tax and current two-layered tier systems have already made cigarette prices lowest in Pakistan among South East Asian region, and the 3rd tier would logically result in smoking epidemic amongst the youth, the report mentioned.

This 3rd tier is also being proposed as a solution to curb smuggled cigarettes, which as per TNCP report findings is not dependent on cigarette prices but reflective of the fact that how easy it is for smugglers to operate in a country, the participation of the tobacco industry in helping the smugglers, how well crime networks are organised, the likelihood of being caught, the punishments, and corruption levels prevalent in the country. FBR failing to take effective measures against such conditions had to resort to adopting a policy that is only beneficial to multinational sales and grossly devastating to health of the young Pakistanis, the report revealed. As per the economic consequence, it is expected that such policy would fail to generate enough revenue for FBR as cigarette prices tend to be inelastic. In fact, FBR is potentially giving up on chances of making more revenue because of the introduction of this new 3rd tier as total Federal Excise Duty (FED) collected from sales of these cigarettes would amount to less revenue compared to revenue collected from cigarettes if higher FED is charged. Such policy would also result in monopolistic character of multinational tobacco companies who can then exploit farmers, distributors and consumers.  This policy would also lead to massive downsizing and closure of nascent local tobacco industry which employees thousands.

Overall the impact to the economy of such policy would unimaginable, while multinationals would easily shift their profits abroad without even taking the blame of such widespread destruction of the local economy where millions are employed and income levels of the labourers have progressively enhanced.

Scientific research findings have found the effectiveness of increased taxation, in different methodology. It has been noticed that every 10 per cent increase in cigarette prices reduces youth smoking by about seven per cent and total cigarette consumption by about four per cent. All such considerations need to be analysed properly before ordering drastic changes in the tobacco world, the report said.