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At UN, nations seek to fight tobacco smuggling
Reuters, 08.01.02, 7:24 PM ET

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By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Many of the 145 countries attending a global conference on cigarette smuggling like the idea of devoting part of their tobacco tax revenues to fighting trafficking, a World Health Organization official said Thursday.

"Many, many countries felt that this was a very sensible way to go, and I believe this will be in the final text of the meeting," said Dr. Derek Yach, head of noncommunicable diseases at the Geneva-based U.N. health arm, the World Health Organization.

"That formula, we believe, is something which should be followed," he told reporters at the end of the three-day conference at U.N. headquarters sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Officials of the U.S. agency said cracking down on the illicit tobacco trade was intended to ensure governments got all the tax revenues due them, so they could spend the money on health programs, among other things.

Strict controls on tobacco sales are also necessary for governments to carry out such health-related policies as restricting sales to young people and requiring health warnings on packaging, they said.

Currently about one of every four cigarettes in international trade is smuggled, cheating governments out of some $20 billion to $30 billion a year in tax revenues, Yach said.

Smugglers use that money to fuel their criminal activities, including terrorism, conference organizers said, citing a U.S. case in which two traffickers were found guilty of supplying Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group with night-vision gear, global positioning systems and computers.

A mechanism devoting a percentage of tobacco tax revenues to strengthen law enforcement is already in place in Britain, Yach said.

Over the past two years, the British treasury has spent $310 million from cigarette taxes on better border controls, he said, estimating the crackdown will result in $3.6 billion in extra government revenues, "which will obviously assure continued tobacco control."

TREATY ON SMOKING

The conference is intended to promote global cooperation in fighting cigarette smuggling and also to generate proposals for negotiations in Geneva, under the World Health Organization's auspices, on a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

The 191 governments participating in those negotiations are struggling to meet a May 2003 target for completing the text of what would eventually become the first international treaty on smoking.

The conference was controversial because the U.S. organizers opened it to participation by tobacco industry executives, who are barred from the negotiations in Geneva.

Anti-smoking groups charged that letting in the tobacco companies amounted to giving them a seat at the table in Geneva.

Yach said the industry participation had been helpful in determining what the companies were capable of doing in terms of licensing, labeling and tracking to improve anti-smuggling controls.

But he warned that governments had to keep a watchful eye on the companies, "given our own experience in having carried out an inquiry into the way in which they subverted all of our policies, from tax policy to advertising to denying evidence on environmental tobacco smoke (passive smoking)."

Copyright 2002, Reuters News Service


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