By IPS Correspondents
Feb 28 1999 (IPS)

The arrest of a shopkeeper for selling cigarettes to a minor last week reflected the paradox in the Egyptian government’s attitude to tobacco products.

On the one hand, the government has led the way in enacting strong anti-smoking legislation but, at the same time, the state continues to be a mega-producer of the offending items.

This Jekyll-and-Hyde approach is further illustrated when visitors see high school students lined up on campus in the cold morning air, listening to a radio broadcast on loudspeakers informing them of the ills of juvenile smoking – all part of a government campaign against smoking.

“Excuse me – do not sell cigarettes to our children”, is the slogan under which the Egyptian Health Minister Ismail Sallam launched the campaign.

Sallam cited some troubling statistics: Some six million Egyptian smokers consume a total of 42 billion cigarettes annually, a figure estimated to rise to 85 billion in the next century.

Sallam also pointed to studies which revealed that 439,000 of cigarette smokers here are children under 10-years-old.

The figures also showed a continuing rise in the number of Egyptian smokers – as in the rest of the developing world – and falling numbers of people smoking in developed countries.

About 55 percent of Egypt’s male population use tobacco and, the number is increasing. A 1995 World Health Organisation (WHO) report on tobacco economics in the eastern Mediterranean region said that the number of smokers in Egypt had increased by 274 per cent between 1963 and 1990.

“It is great to smoke and I have no intention of stopping,” says Essam Fathi as he flicked the ash from the tip of his cigarette while standing in the smoke of traffic jamming Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo “It is one of the few pleasures I have..”

No surprise then that the WHO study, carried out in cooperation with the Central Authority for Public Mobilisation and Statistics, found that five percent of family income in Egypt is spent, in one form or another, on smoking.

Furthermore, the sight of children puffing on a cigarette has become commonplace.

“Sure, I sell cigarettes to kids from my neighbourhood – they buy one or two at a time, not by the pack,” admits a kiosk owner in the working class district of Shubra. “I know it is not good, but these kids work and come to buy with their own money. How can I refuse them?”

The adverse effects of smoking are not to be taken lightly, especially when combined with the high levels of air pollution in Egypt’s cities.

WHO reports that smoking causes 90 per cent of cases of lung cancer in Egypt and that 14.8 per cent of male deaths in 1987 were smoking-related, compared to 8.9 per cent in 1974.

Faced with a growing problem, the Egyptian government banned cigarette advertising on television in 1977, and has said that cigarette packs must carry health warnings and information on tar and nicotine content. As early as 1981, legislation was passed banning smoking on public transport. In the same year, Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi – then Grand Mufti (highest religious authority)-ruled that smoking was ‘haram’ (sinful).

Despite these efforts, the tobacco industry is expected to expand and the state-owned Eastern Tobacco Company is likely to be one of the main beneficiaries. The company, established in 1920 and nationalised in 1956, has a monopoly on local production and is the largest cigarette manufacturer in the Middle East.

According to the latest statistics, it manufactures 0.7 per cent of the world’s total output of cigarettes. In 1996, the company employed 17,000 people and had the capacity to produce 180 million cigarettes per day, though it was running at only 70 per cent capacity.

The government also benefits from the sale of cigarettes through revenue from taxes and tariffs. Although an increase in cigarette prices in 1992 was used to fund student health programmes, 57 per cent of the cost of a packet of domestic cigarettes is tax, and imported cigarettes are subject to an 85 per cent customs tariff.

If international trends reported by WHO are good indicators, developing countries will be the major markets for cigarette producers in future years. In 1996, per capita consumption of cigarettes in developed countries dropped by an average of 1.4 per cent; in the developing countries, it increased by 1.7 per cent.

Given the facts of cigarette production and consumption in Egypt one may wonder how the national anti-smoking campaign could possibly have any effect “We think it is a very positive initiative,” the regional WHO public relations office said. “We issued a report last year entitled ‘Growing Up Without Tobacco’ and we feel that this is an encouraging response.”

Maybe the message is getting through. At Heliopolis High School, where students headed for their classrooms after morning assembly, one pupil told this reporter: “Yes, I think smoking is very bad…it’s only for grownups!” (IPS-YT-mk-99)

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