ABU DHABI // Without significant tobacco taxation, cigarettes remain affordable to the world’s billion-plus smokers, says the World Health Organisation.
The WHO’s Global Tobacco Epidemic 2015 report, released on Tuesday, found too few countries impose either sufficient tobacco taxes, or sometimes any tobacco taxes at all, meaning cigarettes remain affordable to the world’s smokers.
The public health arm of the United Nations said that governments needed to tax tobacco appropriately to reduce its consumption.
Shehnas Abu, a lung specialist at LLH Hospital, said taxes on tobacco would be a tool in forcing smokers to quit. “Taxation will help increase the cost and will help reduce the number of smokers,” she said.
Dr Bodi Saicharan, a respiratory medicine specialist at Abu Dhabi’s Burjeel Hospital, agreed. He said taxation was one of the best measures to curb consumption.
GCC members, however, implement only a customs tariff on tobacco, without levying any additional taxes.
Dr Saicharan said that a white paper published last year proposed an additional 100 per cent duty on tobacco by GCC countries. Should this go ahead, the number of smokers in the region would reduce and that would, he said, address the epidemic of noncommunicable diseases – primarily cancers, cardiovascular and lung diseases and diabetes. Tobacco use is one of the four main risk factors linked to these.
In 2012, these diseases killed 16 million people around the world under 70 years old. Low and middle-income countries accounted for more than 80 per cent of these deaths. The WHO report said more than half of the world’s countries – 2.8 billion people – had implemented at least one of six agreed tobacco-control policies since it set up its master plan in 2008. The figure is up from 2.3 billion when the previous report was released in 2013.
But it said many nations continued to have very low tobacco tax rates or no taxes at all.
Tobacco-related diseases kill 6 million people each year, which will rise to more than 8 million by 2030 unless measures are taken, the WHO said.
“Raising taxes on tobacco products is one of the most effective – and cost-effective – ways to reduce consumption of products that kill, while also generating substantial revenue,” said Dr Margaret Chan, director general of the WHO. “I encourage all governments to look at the evidence, not the industry’s arguments, and adopt one of the best win-win policy options available for health.”
High tobacco taxes are the most cost-effective way to reduce tobacco use, especially among young and low-income people, but the measure is rarely implemented, said the health body. In the US, for example, cigarette prices rose nearly 350 per cent between 1990 and last year, because of a five-fold increase in state taxes and a six-fold increase in the national tax. The number of cigarettes smoked per capita dropped by more than half, and the percentage of adults who smoke fell by nearly one third.
Yet only 33 countries, with 10 per cent of the world’s population, have introduced taxes on tobacco so that more than 75 per cent of the retail price is tax.
Dr Oleg Chestnov, assistant director general of the WHO, said: “Without significant tobacco taxation, cigarettes remain affordable, and we risk reversing the progress made on other measures.”