Transnational tobacco companies and health in underdeveloped countries: Recommendations for avoiding a smoking epidemic

This paper examines the impact of transnational tobacco companies on health in underdeveloped countries and makes recommendations for avoiding a coming smoking epidemic. Although tobacco is generally seen as primarily a health problem, tobacco's future in the Third World depends upon a number of nonhealth related considerations, especially political and economic factors. Unfortunately, there is very little relationship between what the World Health Organization and others have recommended, and what most Third World countries are doing today. Although the controversy concerning cigarette smoking and health has only become a 'burning issue' in recent decades, tobacco products have been used around the world for hundreds of years. The public outcry against cigarette smoking has become increasingly widespread since the 1964 U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking and health. The ill effects of cigarette smoking are now widely considered collectively as the number one preventable health problem in the world, responsible for an estimated 2.5 million deaths per year. In response to declining sales in developed countries, the tobacco transnational corporations have begun focusing their attention on Third World markets, where tobacco consumption has increased dramatically in recent years. Cigarettes not only take precious limited resources away from desperately needed basic human needs, but they also inflict future health problems on vast numbers of Third World people who have only a vague understanding of the risks involved in cigarette smoking. Until Third World governments address the long-term consequences of their short-term lust for cash, the probabilities of a smoking epidemic in the Third World grow increasingly likely. Given the capitalist world economy in which Third World countries are embedded, the possibilities for avoiding a smoking epidemic are all the more clouded.