Women Renew Vow to Push for Anti-Tobacco Convention

By Bert Wilkinson

When it is passed by member states of the United Nations late next year, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control will become the world’s first international treaty based on a single public health theme, an achievement the non-government community is already celebrating, though victory is still a way off.

The convention seeks to restrict the growth, reduce the marketing power and cut down on the number of people dying each year from smoking and tobacco-related illnesses.

And if the powerful women’s arm of the international civil society movement has its way, governments will be asked to support and ratify a convention that could, in part, call for outright bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship.

Yesterday, women from places as diverse as Sweden and Japan, Kenya and Brazil came together to reaffirm their commitment to seeing the passage of the convention through all its stages, including ratification, and to refine their continuing battle plan against an anticipated tough counter-campaign from tobacco’s big-spending players.

“This convention is directed mainly at an industry and against a product that kills people,” said Patricia Lambert, a legal adviser in South Africa’s health ministry. “This issue affects women all over the world, the developing countries in particular, where many are involved in the drying and curing process and have to inhale tobacco smoke with babies on their backs. We are confident that the convention will make it,” she said after a women’s forum on the issue, yesterday.

The women’s lobby is ensuring that they remain close to the fight to get the convention through because they want its text to be firm and clear about outlawing tobacco advertising and promotion because of its tendency in recent years to deliberately target women and young people.

With support from the Arab League of nations where smoking is considered un-Islamic, and backing from several European and Caribbean nations, the women’s lobby group is not too worried about the next 16 months or so.

Several planning meetings are on the cards before the May 2003 target date for the convention’s passage in the United Nations, including one involving the International Negotiating Body (INB) in Geneva, Switzerland in October and another next March, mostly likely in South Africa.

Ramming home their point, Zimbabwe’s Operation Green, for example, cited instances of non-smoking women dying of chronic bronchitis and other smoke-related diseases because their husbands smoked for years, in some cases, unaware of the effects of second-hand smoke on others.

“We are worried about the fact that some women in some developing countries are not even aware of the hazards of smoking,” said Mary Mbandi, 55 of Kenya.

The forum expressed concern that as the anti-tobacco lobby becomes stronger in the United States and as the industry is hit by successful lawsuits, it will begin to move farms to the Third World where official controls against issues like pesticide use are not as tight and comprehensive as in the West.

Litha Musyimi Ogana, of the African Centre for Empowerment on Gender and Equity, thinks that the world should wake up to the billions of dollars spent each year on the military and tobacco.

“The world’s NGO movement has the figures on military spending. It is close to 790 billion dollars per year and the next biggest industry is tobacco, more than half of that. Do you realize that we are spending that much money on two industries that kill people and cause destruction? A quarter of that (money) could eradicate poverty, provide water, deal with illiteracy and a host of other ills now affecting us,” she said.

Once the fight to ratify the convention is won, the women’s lobby plans to turn its attention to the mega-billion fast food industry they blame for killing millions each year through clogged arteries via fatty and high cholesterol foods like burgers, french fries and fried chicken.