The first Meeting of the Parties to the Illicit Trade Protocol (ITP) starts today. It is crucial for delegates to understand the tobacco industry’s role in illicit trade before discussions begin.
The ITP aims to eliminate all forms of illicit tobacco but has a particular focus on securing the supply chain of legally manufactured tobacco products. Latest estimates suggest that approximately 60–70 per cent of the illicit market is tobacco industry product, indicating that, at the very least, tobacco companies are failing to control their supply chain in the knowledge that their products will end up on the illicit market.
The ITP requires a global track and trace system to reduce tobacco smuggling which will be achieved by each party requiring that every pack manufactured in or imported to their territory has a unique, secure marking providing information on manufacture, shipping and distribution.
The ITP stipulates that this ‘shall not be performed by or delegated to the tobacco industry’- a crucial requirement given that the industry has a vested interest in controlling measures aimed at controlling its supply chain. To this end, PMI adapted its pack marker system Codentify and freely licensed it to its three main competitors who then collectively promoted it to governments using front groups and third parties, despite the system being ineffective and inefficient as a track and trace solution.
In 2016 the system was sold to a company called Inexto, with PMI claiming this complied with WHO requirements.
Yet some of Inexto’s staff feature long-time PMI employees credited with creating Codentify and a complex web of shared intellectual property interests exists between these individuals and the two companies.
This is not the only threat that the industry poses to the ITP. Tobacco companies are a major funding source of data on illicit tobacco with the industry regularly commissioning reports which provide data on the scale of illicit tobacco across various countries and continents.
Recent research from the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath found that existing assessments of industry-funded data demonstrate that such data are not reliable. When compared with independent sources, they consistently overestimate the scale of illicit tobacco and frequently fail to meet the quality and transparency standards of peer-reviewed research.
Such data enables the industry to promote conclusions about the scale and nature of the illicit trade which cannot be easily disproved. The industry argues it is the victim of the illicit market, emphasising the role of counterfeit cigarettes, while arguing that that public health measures rather than the industry’s supply chain failures fuel illicit trade.
Parties to the ITP must reject the industry’s track and trace system while remaining vigilant against industry obscurantism. Parties also need to be aware that industry data on illicit serve as a platform for the industry’s lobbying and PR strategies. When fighting illicit trade, we shouldn’t look to the industry fuelling the problem to tell us how to understand or solve it.