BETWEEN FOOD AND TOBACCO
Tobacco is dangerous to health. Critical stakeholders should do more to stem its production and use
All over the world, health experts continue to strategise and formulate rigorous and effective policies, alerting citizens of the harmful effects of tobacco use. Amongst
the risks associated with tobacco use are several types of cancer, coronary heart disease, asthma, infertility for women, and the economic burden of a heavily subsidised health system for tobacco-induced illnesses, reduction in productivity and death. But as the world marked this year’s World No Tobacco Day last Thursday, Nigeria was missing in action even though the theme for 2023, ‘Grow Food, Not Tobacco’ should ordinarily resonate.
With 57.9 per cent of people on the continent (with majority of them in Nigeria) suffering from moderate to severe food insecurity, there has been a campaign to assist farmers in shifting from tobacco growing to food crops. “While the number of people using tobacco products is decreasing in other parts of the world, it is rising in the Africa Region,” according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti. “For example, the number of tobacco users in the WHO African Region increased from an estimated 64 million adult users in 2000 to 73 million in 2018. This is partly due to the increased production of tobacco products as well as aggressive marketing by the tobacco industry.”
As we have highlighted several times on this page, available statistics amply demonstrate that comprehensive health education programmes on smoking cessation and control, as well as legislation are major components in the battle for the health of our young people. However, as many countries initiate and enact laws and effective policies to safeguard their young from tobacco use, the tobacco industry continues to research and explore avenues to increase their sales, especially by targeting young people. Consequently, developing countries, with their teeming youth populations and lack of regulation, have become hugely attractive targets of Big Tobacco. It is evident that the industry has closed tobacco manufacturing factories in strictly regulated environments, whose ‘hostile’ policies and laws have succeeded in curbing advertisements and unrestricted tobacco use, and proceeded to open them in developing countries, whose governments have failed to understand, design and adopt appropriate measures to protect their citizens.
In our country, tobacco companies persist in deceptively branding their activities with ‘grants’ and ‘donations’ from established foundations that do not nearly cover the public health costs in the gullible communities where they operate. They claim they provide employment while the precise numbers on their payrolls are blatantly negligible compared to the families that suffer from the (potential) loss of their breadwinners and their future, as a consequence of their business.
The fact that Nigeria has finally fulfilled its international obligations by domesticating the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) through the enactment of the National Tobacco Control Act 2015 is a step in the right direction. But the country still needs to act urgently and decisively to save itself the current ‘invisible’ public health expenditure on tobacco-related diseases. A survey conducted in the country about a decade ago revealed that children between the ages of 13 and 15 years were already smokers with 55 per cent of children within the same age bracket exposed as passive smokers. Even among adults, one out of every 10 Nigerians male adult smoke.
Articles 17 and 18 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) recommends that African countries should come up with policies that will enable “tobacco farmers to shift to growing food crops that would provide them and their families with a better life while enhancing the protection of the environment and the health of people.” By doing this, according to Moeti, “we will be growing food, which our populations need, not tobacco.”
That’s the way to go!
