Chewing tobacco has been a tradition in India for centuries. Of the total amount of tobacco produced in the country, around 48% is in the form of chewing tobacco, 38% as bidis, and only 14% as cigarettes. Thus, bidis, snuff and chewing tobacco (such as gutka, khaini and zarda) form the bulk (86%) of India’s total tobacco production. In the rest of the world, production of cigarettes is 90% of total production of tobacco related products.

The per capita consumption of cigarettes in India is merely a tenth of the world average. This unique tobacco consumption pattern is a combination of tradition and more importantly the tax imposed on cigarettes over the last 2 decades. Cigarette smokers pay almost 85% of the total tax revenues generated from tobacco.

The Indian tobacco industry

India is the second largest producer of tobacco in the world after China. It produced 572 m kgs of tobacco in FY03. However, India holds a meager 0.7% share of the US$ 30 bn global trade in tobacco, with cigarettes accounting for 85% of the country’s total tobacco exports.

Despite being the second largest producer, India is only the ninth largest exporter of tobacco and tobacco products in the world. Out of the total tobacco produced in India, only one-third is flue-cured tobacco suitable for cigarette manufacturing. Most of the tobacco produce is suitable for the manufacture of chewing tobacco, bidis and other cheap tobacco products, which have no demand outside the country. In India, three major cigarette players dominate the market, primarily ITC with 72% market share, Godfrey Phillips with 12% and VST with 8% share of the market.

Hello again. Now I will post about the industry estrategies in Brazil and our efforts to face it. Brazil has 183,987,291 inhabitants (IBGE, 2007), and presents an enormous young population - 51.1 million people aged between 15 and 29 years, which corresponds to 27.4% of the total population (IBGE, 2006). Considering this significant part of young people with own source of income, the tobacco industry has permanently invested in marketing and political strategies to conquer them: the 6th cheapest cigarettes of the world; the great smuggled cigarette availability; the diversity of sale’s points, where the marketing is still permitted and the social and environment corporative responsibility like Cultural and Environment Dialogues and the University Dialogues are examples. These ones happens in partnership with universities and students’ representative entities, bringing to the university public free lectures with sports celebrities, intellectuals and so on that are usually well known personalities, with great credibility among the youth segment. Since its creation in 2005, they already had been in universities of all the five regions of Brazil, reaching more than 23,000 young and constructing strong bonds with the students’ management companies. The conquest of an ample students’ social acceptance is expressed in the evaluation they have made, available in the company’s site: 97% had evaluated the Program as good or very good and 99% had considered the discussed subjects as interesting or very interesting. These all explain how still 3.7% of the Brazilian population between 12 and 17 years are smokers. This percentage grows for 16% considering the population between 18 and 24 years. These strategies shock with the National Tobacco Control Program, that has been facing Industry since the decade of 1980, having as one of its more significant conquests the total smoking products advertising ban in the television, Internet, and others, besides the sports, artistic and cultural events sponsorship’s banishment, through Federal Law nº10.167/00. This important conquers has been a cause of litigation for the Industry, having Souza Cruz petitioned against the federal law with an Unconstitutionality Direct Action (ADIN) to cancel the ban. The National Cancer Institute - INCA, an office of the Health Ministery, where the National coordination is located, has already subsidized the Federal Government that has already gone to justice with a contrary legal action. The same has done the Brasilian Alliance for Tobacco Control - ACTBr, that represents the social control of the tobacco control policy in Brazil. To face this offensive we need to extend social mobilization to maintain the advertising prohibition and also to extend it to 100% of prohibiton, that is also in the points of sale. We need also to foment a critical attitude by the youngsters collectively building up strategies for the creation of a National Young Net for Tobacco Control in Brazil linked with LA RED – “Latinoamerica Respira Diferente” (THE NET) that is a net of youth for advocacy to tobacco control, composed of 50 youngsters of 06 Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay, that assumed the role of national leaderships to trace action in their nations. Currently Brazil is represented only by a technician assessor of our Coordination,that is Evandro. For its democratic, equality, multiplying and participative nature, the social networks are presented as the most adequate channels to improve the youthful enrollment. The possibility of creation of young net for tobacco control from the human and social capital preexisting in the youth movements and organizations opens new possibilities and would set fire a significant social and political pressure to deep the restrictions to the industry. We are sure this meeting will certainly promote this. Thats all for now. Hope to see you soon. Evandro Alves and Maristela Menezes. Recife/PE/Brazil.

Hello all! I am Evandro Alves Barbosa Filho, from Recife city, in Pernambuco state, northeast Brazil. I am very happy in had been invited to participate in this terrific Conference! I can´t wait to meet you all soon and can be able to share experiences and plan an agenda for youth advocacy around the world. As were asked, I am publishing my profile in tobacco control advocacy and awareness. Recife is a city with more than 1,5 million of inhabitants situated in northeast Brazil. I have being working with health promotion trough a continuous health education process towards the creation and implementation of Smoke - Free Workplaces; civil society mobilization towards disclosure of the tobacco industry’s strategies; elaboration of projects, scientific papers to national and international conferences in Tobacco Control and Social Work field and educative material in the Recife’s Tobacco Control Policy Coordination of the Health Secretariat. I also have been interviewed by local media. Actually, I am working in order to improve social control for this policy involving the Municipal Health Council and organized civil society. We developed in October of 2008 a formation cycle for the Council members that had as objective to strengthen the tobacco control actions in the city, through social oversight; to promote ethical, social, political, economic and cultural formation about the tobacco control issue and to stimulate tobacco control advocacy. I am also working to implement the Latin America Youth Net – LA RED, in which I represent Brazil, by starting from my city, first establishing partnership with the Universities’ Student’s Movement. Also I intend to improve the Recife’s Social Civil Mobilization Forum.

Greetings to all the delegates! This is Sasha Bhatnagar from India and it’s almost impossible to put in words, how strongly I feel against the use of tobacco. One aspect of this issue, is the surprising way in which courts in particular countries pay the families of smokers a fine amount of money and term it as a - ‘Punitive Damage’. It is extremely shocking for me to know this, because I think most of us believe, that smokers inflict the aftermath of their wrongdoings upon themselves. So here is a report I would like to share with all of you.       

A Florida jury has done a strange thing. It has freely acknowledged that a man who died after decades as
a chain smoker had the primary responsibility for his harmful habit. But in the same ruling, it has ordered tobacco company Philip Morris to pay the man’s widow the shocking sum of $8 million. The whole of  Florida was itself schocked.                                                                                     
We have great sympathy for smokers who become sick or die, even though they brought those tragic circumstances on themselves by smoking. But sympathy for a sick smoker or for his surviving relatives should not be the basis on which large amounts of damages are awarded in court.

The reality is, the dangers of smoking have been widely known by the public for many decades — even for centuries, judging from historical records. The Florida man who died, Stuart Hess, had smoked although he surely knew he was seriously endangering his health. The same is true of other smokers.