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Lai hits back over donations furore
| South China Morning Post 18 Oct. 2011
Media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying has defended multimillion-dollar donations to Hong Kong’s pan-democrat community and Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun after details of his charitable giving were leaked this week. A spokesman for Lai’s private office said the tycoon’s private donations to political groups were entirely legal, and “consistent with Mr Lai’s well-known support of an open and free Hong Kong society”. While his office would not comment on specific donations, documents have surfaced on the file-sharing search engine Foxy which show that the billionaire Next Media (SEHK: 0282) mogul spent more than HK$60 million from 2005. Zen was the biggest recipient, receiving more than HK$20 million. It was also stated that the Democratic Party received HK$13,690,000 from 2006 to last year and the Civic Party was given HK$14,566,500 for the same period. The radical League of Social Democrats was awarded HK$1 million last year, while former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang received HK$1.3 million from 2007 to 2009. A purported cash-flow forecast, printed on another leaked document, also showed the Civic Party would be given another HK$2 million from July to September this year, while the Democratic Party would receive HK$3 million. Past donations made amount to more than HK$60 million, the documents state. Other officials close to Lai said they believed private commercial records had been circulated for political motives. They claim the resultant media frenzy serves as a diversion from more worrying issues for Hong Kong’s political establishment. In the longer term, the revelations could be used to smear Zen and his allies across the democratic camp – even though all parties and churches in Hong Kong are free to accept local donations without making them public, they said. A senior cleric with the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese, Vicar General Father Dominic Chan Chi-ming, said that Zen could receive donations and spend them at his own discretion. “This is his private matter. We cannot investigate,” he said. It is understood Zen has spent donations on supporting official and underground religious workers on the mainland, as well as on religious and charity programmes in Hong Kong. He has helped various projects on the mainland, including infrastructure construction in underprivileged areas. Sponsorships have also been provided for followers who embark on spiritual trips to Rome. Zen could not be reached for comment yesterday but his secretary, Teresa Fung, said the cardinal often directly supported followers financially. For example, he has funded a charity programme in Hong Kong which sends mooncakes to prisoners and the elderly. Anthony Lam, a senior researcher at the Holy Spirit Study Centre, a Hong Kong think tank funded by the church, said Zen would not be the only one who received funding from private donors. Top religious leaders such as cardinals and bishops often received donations from the wealthy, and distributed funding to religious workers in developing countries, such as the mainland, he said. “I believe Cardinal Zen is helping everyone in China, both official and underground church members,” he said. Zen has actively pushed for universal suffrage in Hong Kong over the past few years and has been seen as closely linked to the pan-democratic movement. Democratic and Civic Party officials have refused to comment, seeking to protect the identity of their donors. The Civic Party said it did not accept funds that came with conditions. The documents show a variety of other Lai donations, including sums given to the club and fashion impresario David Tang, conservative Washington think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and the World Wide Fund for Nature. The prominent US China scholar Perry Link was also on the list. Additional reporting by Danny Mok, Tanna Chong and Peter So |
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American Enterprise Institute tobacco support and global warming denial
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute
1. Climate change denial – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial – CachedSimilar
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As one tobacco company memo noted: “Doubt is our product since it is the best … More than 20 AEI employees worked as consultants to the George W. Bush
The Guardian reported that after the IPCC released its February 2007 report, the American Enterprise Institute offered British, American, and other scientists $10,000, plus travel expenses, to publish articles critical of the assessment. The institute, which had received more than $US 1.6 million from Exxon and whose vice-chairman of trustees is Lee Raymond, former head of Exxon, sent letters that, The Guardian said, “attack the UN‘s panel as ‘resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work’ and ask for essays that ‘thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs’.” More than 20 AEI employees worked as consultants to the George W. Bush administration.[36] Despite her initial conviction that with “the overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered,” Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer said that when she learned of the AEI’s offer, “I realized there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up.”[8]
China Endorsing Tobacco in Schools Adds to $10 Trillion GDP Cost
By Bloomberg News – Sep 20, 2011
In dozens of rural villages in China’s western provinces, one of the first things primary school kids learn is what made their education possible: tobacco.
“On the gates of these schools, you’ll see slogans that say ‘Genius comes from hard work — Tobacco helps you become talented,’” said Xu Guihua, secretary general of the privately funded lobby group Chinese Association on Tobacco Control. The schools are sponsored by local units of China’s government-owned monopoly cigarette maker. “They are pinning their hopes on young people taking up smoking.”
Anti-tobacco groups say efforts to reduce sales in the world’s largest cigarette consumer, such as a ban on smoking in public places introduced in May, have been hampered by light penalties, a lack of education about the dangers of smoking and the fact that the regulator, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, also runs the world’s biggest cigarette maker, China National Tobacco Corp.
China has more than 320 million smokers, a third of the world’s total, and about 1 million Chinese die from tobacco- related illnesses every year. Reducing mortality in the country from cardiovascular diseases, for which smoking is a main risk factor, by 1 percent a year over the three decades to 2040 could generate economic value equal to 68 percent of China’s 2010 real gross domestic product, or $10.7 trillion, according to a World Bank report published in July.
“Despite the strong will of the government to implement smoking control policies,” the volume of cigarettes sold in China is expected to keep rising from 2011 to 2015, London-based researcher Euromonitor International said in a July report. It forecasts China’s tobacco market will grow at an average 14 percent a year to hit 1.8 trillion yuan in retail sales in 2015.
Sales Rising
The tobacco industry grew at an average annual rate of 19 percent from 2006 to 2010, according to State Tobacco. Last year, earnings rose 17 percent 605 billion yuan ($95 billion), including 499 billion yuan in taxes. About 53 percent of Chinese men and 2.4 percent of women smoke, according to a 2010 survey by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
While China’s laws ban tobacco advertising on radio, television and in newspapers, they “do not have clear restrictions on sales and sponsorship activities,” according to a report published in January by Yang Gonghuan, a former deputy director of China’s Center for Disease Control, and Tsinghua University professor Hu Angang. The report, titled “Tobacco Control and China’s Future”, cited the example of a Chinese cigarette brand that sponsored a TV series, ensuring that the name appeared during the closing credits.
The European Union banned all tobacco advertising in its member states in 2005. Last year, new U.S. rules ended the industry’s backing of sports like Nascar racing.
‘Healthy Mothers’
Other tobacco sponsorship in China includes funding for 42 primary school libraries in Xinjiang and 40 in Tibet in September 2010, and a 10 million yuan donation in Nov 2010 to a Chinese women’s development fund for a “Healthy Mothers’ Express” campaign, the report said. China National Tobacco, lists charitable activities on its website, including a 5 million yuan donation this month for drought-hit Yunnan province.
In a survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted in 2009 by the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control, 7 percent had a good impression of the tobacco industry because of its charity work, while 18 percent said they would pick a cigarette brand based on involvement in such activities.
State Tobacco’s press office didn’t respond to requests for interviews or a faxed list of questions about sponsorship.
China decided to create a tobacco monopoly in the 1980s when the industry supplied more than 10 percent of government revenue, said Wang Shiyong, the World Bank’s senior health specialist in Beijing. Today, tobacco contributes 6.7 percent, according to figures from Yang and Hu’s report.
Internal Lobbying
“Especially in tobacco-growing provinces like Yunnan and Guizhou, the tobacco industry is a very important part of local government income,” said Wang. “There is a lot of internal government lobbying to make sure the health consequences of smoking are not addressed.”
The lack of awareness is an issue lung surgeon Liu Deruo is trying to address, starting in his own hospital. Liu lit his first cigarette in 1974 while forced to work in a tobacco field in northeast China during the Cultural Revolution.
“All the farmers I worked with smoked, so I also smoked,” said the 55-year-old head of thoracic surgery at Beijing’s China-Japan Friendship Hospital, who quit after going to medical college. He persuaded the 15 surgeons who work for him also to kick the habit. “Now I tell my doctors they are allowed to smoke only in my office, and nobody dares to do so.”
Liu’s campaign is part of an effort to get doctors to lead reforms in people’s lifestyles.
‘Role Models’
“Doctors’ smoking behavior is of particular importance,” said Sarah England, technical officer at the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization in China. “They are role models for their patients and for the general public.”
A government survey found that two in five male doctors light up every day in China. When Liu took over his department in 2001, 94 percent of the doctors smoked, he said.
Pfizer Inc. (PFE), whose Champix is the main prescription anti- smoking drug sold in China, funded a three-year program from 2008 to set up 60 smoke-free hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to help doctors quit. Smoking among the hospitals’ leadership more than halved to 8.4 percent from 19.1 percent, while overall rates for doctors fell to 6.8 percent from 10.7 percent, said Neena Moorjani, a spokeswoman for the New York- based drugmaker in an e-mail.
Western Images
The education drive has a way to go. Only one in four adults in China believe exposure to tobacco smoke causes heart diseases and lung cancer, and the percentage for smokers is even lower — 22 percent — according to the 2010 Global Adult Tobacco Survey for China.
“Socially, smoking is still part of everyday life in China and images, many from the West, still glamorize smoking,” said Linda Sarna, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Nursing, in an e-mail. “Quitting smoking is still not the norm,” said Sarna, who is recruiting 1,000 nurses at four Beijing hospitals for a new smoking intervention program.
China National Tobacco is one of the country’s biggest employers, with 510,000 staff and its monopoly on production has meant international rivals have made little progress in the country. The state cigarette maker controlled 97.9 percent of the market in 2010, followed by British American Tobacco PLC (BATS) with 0.6 percent, Philip Morris International Inc. (PM) with 0.3 percent, and Japan Tobacco Inc. (2914) with 0.1 percent, according to Euromonitor.
Closed Market
Philip Morris, the world’s second-biggest tobacco company, entered the market in 2008 after signing a license for China National Tobacco to produce Marlboros at two factories.
“For now, the Chinese market is pretty much closed,” Chief Financial Officer Herman Waldemer said at a conference on Sept. 7. “There is a complete monopoly on it. We are developing our relationships.”
In addition to State Tobacco’s control of the industry, it is also part of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which chairs the eight-member body tasked with implementing the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in China, said Xu, a former deputy director at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The government and the industry are in the same body — the regulator is also the enterprise,” she said.
Judith Mackay, a senior policy advisor to the World Health Organization, said the power of the tobacco industry in China made it more difficult to address the problem.
Health Warnings
“An amazing number of things in China come under the jurisdiction of the tobacco industry,” she said. “The health warnings on cigarettes for example. It’s not under the Health Ministry. There’s clearly a set of conflict of interests.”
Regional units of the monopoly fund more than 100 primary schools throughout China, such as the Sichuan Tobacco Hope Primary School, the official Xinhua News Agency reported in May. Some are named after top-selling brands like Hongta, which means red pagoda, or Zhongnanhai, named after the compound next to the Forbidden City where China’s top leaders live and work.
“We’ve been trying to get the Ministry of Education to stop the tobacco companies from sponsoring these schools,” said Xu. “But the ministry wants us to show them proof that this is causing harm.”
–Daryl Loo. Editors: Adam Majendie, Bret Okeson
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Daryl Loo in Beijing at +86-10-6649-7540 or dloo7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jason Gale at j.gale@bloomberg.net
®2011 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Child labour: the tobacco industry’s smoking gun
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/sep/14/malawi-child-labour-tobacco-industry/print
In Malawi and beyond, child workers as young as five are being exposed to the toxic dangers of tobacco harvesting
A tobacco farm in Malawi. Many of the country’s estimated 80,000 child tobacco workers suffer from nicotine poisoning. Photograph: Kristin Palitza
At the height of the tobacco harvest season, Malawi‘s lush, flowing fields are filled with young children picking the big green-yellow leaves. Some can count their age on one hand.
One of them is five-year-old Olofala, who works every day with his parents in rural Kasungu, one of Malawi’s key tobacco growing districts. When asked if he will go to school next year, he shrugs his shoulders.
One thing is clear to Olofala already: work comes first, education second. His sister, Ethel, 12, is only in year three. She attends school irregularly because she has to work, or because she is sick. “I cough,” she says. “I have chest pains and headaches. Sometimes it feels like you don’t have enough breath.”
Such complaints are not uncommon. Many of Malawi’s estimated 80,000 child tobacco workers suffer from a disease called green tobacco sickness, or nicotine poisoning. Symptoms include severe headaches, abdominal cramps, muscle weakness, breathing difficulties, diarrhoea and vomiting, high blood pressure and fluctuations in heart rate, according to the World Health Organisation.
Since the handling of the leaves is done largely without protective clothing, workers absorb up to 54 milligrams of dissolved nicotine daily through their skin, equal to the amount of 50 cigarettes, according to 2005 research by Prof Robert McKnight, of the College of Public Health at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Farm owners routinely plead ignorance of the health implications. “I never heard about touching tobacco leaves being dangerous,” says Fraston Mkwantha, who plants 15 hectares of tobacco in Kasungu district.
At the consumer end of the chain, smokers are constantly reminded of the associated health risks. Most are oblivious to the reality that, far from harming only themselves, their toxic habit is slowly killing the underage children involved in the production process.
Until the 1980s, much of the world’s tobacco was grown in the US. Today, however, about 85% of worldwide production comes from the global south, where tobacco child labour is a major problem, according to a 2010 US Department of Labour report (pdf).
“In any developing country where tobacco is grown, you find child labour starting at the age of five,” says Marty Otañez, a researcher at the University of California’s tobacco control research and education centre.
Malawi, which has the highest number of child labourers in Africa, is a key offender. Health issues aside, children are also financially exploited. Olofala and Ethel often work 12-hour days, but neither earns a salary. They “help” their parents, who work on one of Kasungu’s 22,000 registered tobacco farms and estates. Other kids receive an average of $0.25 for long hours of unrelenting work.
They are arguably the lucky ones; some never see their money at all. “We have many reports of children who were lured into labour with promises of good pay. But at the end of a season, all they get is an old sweater,” says Grace Masanya, Malawi project manager for Plan, the international child rights NGO.
At the heart of the problem is Malawi’s poor economic situation. Parents involve their children in economic activities to provide food for the family.
Over the past decade, the country has become one of the five largest tobacco producers in the world, largely due to low tariffs on unmanufactured tobacco imports, cheap labour and lack of regulations. According to the UN’s statistical division, more than 98% of Malawi’s low-cost leaf is exported, with the EU and the US top destinations.
And more than 90% of Malawi’s tobacco is bought by two US-based leaf buyers, Universal Corporation and Alliance One International, which resell it to international tobacco firms. Their main clients are two of the world’s biggest cigarette manufacturers, Philip Morris (Marlboro) and British American Tobacco (Lucky Strike). Consequently, Malawi’s tobacco is found in the blend of almost every cigarette smoked in the west.
Child labour rights
The country is a signatory to the UN and International Labour Organisation (ILO) child labour conventions, and also has its own legislative framework barring the employment of children under 14. So why does the government turn a blind eye? The answer is simple: Malawi’s economy is heavily dependent on tobacco, which makes up 70% of its export earnings, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
“Some estates follow anti-child labour regulations, but others purposefully flaunt the law in the interest of higher profits,” says Plan Malawi advisor MacDonald Mumba. Over the past two years, only 49 farm owners have been prosecuted in Malawi, he says. Most received a $34 fine.
Gaps and inconsistencies in Malawi’s legislative framework contribute to the problems of child labour, according to the ILO.
“The legal framework is very weak,” confirms Unicef child protection programme officer Tomoko Horii, who believes promises to eliminate child labour amount to little more than window dressing presented in response to mounting international pressure. The laws lack specific targets to reduce child labour and, most importantly, an appropriate budget. “The budget allocation is minimal. So far all projects have to be financed by international NGOs,” says Horii.
Her sentiments are echoed by Khalid Hassan, the ILO’s child labour adviser in Malawi. “Ratifying conventions and passing laws doesn’t solve the problem,” says Hassan. “You need money, commitment, cost-effective programmes, infrastructure and hard work.”
The tobacco giants, who all have anti-child labour policies in place, insist they abide by the rules. British American Tobacco (BAT)says on its website that it does “not employ children in any of our operations worldwide”, but admits that using intermediaries to purchase tobacco makes it difficult to trace the country from which they buy the leaf and ensure all farm owners follow the rules.
That is bad news for countries such as Malawi, where the education system is feeble and only a third of children complete primary school. “Unless the education sector scales up to offer quality education to all children, they will continue to work,” says Horii.
Tobacco growing is extraordinarily lucrative for the industry. Financial reports for 2008 by the five big tobacco companies – BAT, Philip Morris, China National Tobacco Company, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco – show that they collectively earned $300bn. This is more money than the GDP of all but 40 countries worldwide.
Part of the reason for those huge profits is that tobacco giants benefit from $1.2bn in unpaid child labour costs, according to Otañez’s colleague Prof Stanton Glantz. Replacing child labour with adults paid the minimum wage would increase the production costs by $10m per year in Malawi alone, he says.
For Glantz, the solution is simple: “If major tobacco companies were genuinely committed to improving the socio-economic conditions of child workers, they should rectify harmful business practices by enforcing a policy that they will not purchase any tobacco grown using child labour.”
The tobacco giants disagree. “Simply stopping altogether our purchases of tobacco from Malawi will do nothing to alleviate the serious issue of child labour in this country,” says Anne Edwards, director of external communications for Philip Morris.
While this standoff continues, the people of Malawi benefit little from their “green gold”. Malawi remains one of the least developed nations in the world, ranking 153 out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index. About 40% of the 13.2 million Malawians live below the poverty line of $1.25 a day.
Clear the Air says : Local smokers must show they are smart as ‘wild man’ Shirley and QUIT
Malaysian Orangutan to Kick Smoking Habit
Associated Press
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia—A captive orangutan often spotted smoking cigarettes given to her by zoo visitors is being forced to kick the habit, a Malaysian wildlife official said Monday.
Associated Press
An orangutan called Shirley smoking at Johor Zoo in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.
Government authorities seized the adult ape named Shirley from a state-run zoo in Malaysia’s southern Johor state last week after she and several other animals there were deemed to be living in poor conditions.
Shirley is now being quarantined at another zoo in a neighboring state and is expected to be sent to a Malaysian wildlife center on Borneo island within weeks.
Melaka Zoo Director Ahmad Azhar Mohammed said Shirley is not being provided with any more cigarettes because “smoking is not normal behavior for orangutans.”
“I would say she is not addicted … but she might have formed a habit after mimicking human beings who were smoking around her,” Mr. Ahmad told the Associated Press.
Shirley was so far displaying a regular appetite for food and no obvious signs of depression or illness, Mr. Ahmad said. Results from her blood tests and other detailed health examinations were not yet available.
Nature Alert, a British-based activist group, wrote to Malaysian officials about Shirley earlier this year, saying conservationists who visited the Johor zoo often saw people throwing lit cigarettes to her in a pit-like enclosure.
The group said Shirley seemed to suffer severe mood swings, sometimes looking drowsy and on other occasions appearing “very agitated” without a cigarette.
It is not clear when Shirley started smoking. Officials have estimated she is around 20 years old. Orangutans, which are native to rainforests in Borneo and Indonesia’s Sumatra island, can live up to about 60 years in captivity.
Other countries such as South Africa and Russia have also reported cases of primates learning to smoke after zoo visitors ignored warnings and tossed cigarettes into the cages of chimpanzees.
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Tobacco money opens University registration
South China Morning Post – 12 Sept. 2011
A prestigious Beijing university denied rumours that it enrolled an 11-year-old because his father donated millions of yuan, saying the admittance was in line with all requirements and regulations.
Xu Hengrui , from Yunnan province, is a first-year student at Renmin University’s law school. He is the university’s youngest ever recruit. There is no minimum age for taking the college-entrance examination. But online rumours claim that Xu was admitted to the college before sitting the exam, on the condition that he achieve the minimum score for college entry, after a large sum had been donated by his father, the chairman of a tobacco supply company in Mile county.
The rumours also said Xu had been driving since seven. The minimum age for a driver’s licence is 18.
Xu’s academic prowess was described online as average, but he was made out to be a genius in Yunnan.
An unidentified official at the admittance office of Renmin University said Xu was recommended by the Yunnan education department, and his performances in the written test, interview and review by an independent committee all met the university’s criteria for its special admittance programme, according to a report by The Beijing News.
The official denied Xu’s father was on the university’s board directors.
A vice-president of Mile No1 Middle School, where Xu was registered, told the newspaper that Xu scored 526 points on the college-entrance exam, 31 points more than the benchmark for top universities in Yunnan. He said Xu had criticised the teaching at his primary school since second grade, before moving to Kunming , where he was taught at home by tutors.
The vice-president said Xu returned to the school for exams in an Audi that he had driven alone from Kunming, about 140 kilometres from Mile county.
