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Tobacco industry spurned
PARLIAMENT – The tobacco industry has proposed a forum be set up to facilitate dialogue among the anti-smoking lobby, the Department of Health and the industry.
The proposal, made by the managing director of British American Tobacco SA, David Crow, at a meeting of Parliament’s health portfolio committee, was immediately rejected by the National Council Against Smoking.
The latter said it would not take part in “window-dressing”.
The committee is holding hearings on a Bill to tighten up existing tobacco control legislation.
Crow said the industry was keen to set up a stakeholder forum where there was “very open engagement”.
BAT had regularly invited the anti-smoking lobby and the department to structured social reporting dialogues over the past five years, with no response, he said.
Director of the National Council Against Smoking Dr Yussuf Saloojee said the council would talk to the tobacco industry if it believed doing so would result in improvements in public health.
“But what the tobacco industry is interested in doing at the moment is trying to co-opt us in order to increase their profits.”
He said a statement to the committee from the Tobacco Institute of SA, which said the industry agreed smoking was a health problem, but that the committee should move on to other issues, showed that industry concerns about the 30 000 South Africans killed by tobacco every year were peripheral.
“The agenda for them at the moment is to increase sales and the agenda for us is to decrease deaths. And I don’t see any common ground at the moment.”
Elsewhere in the hearings, debate continued over whether the powdered tobacco product snus should fall under the same controls as smoking tobacco.
Swedish Match executive Tomas Hammargren told the committee that experts had said snus, which is packaged in small pouches held under the lip, was 90% less harmful than smoking. – Sapa.
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