British American Tobacco SA (BATSA), one of South Africa’s largest tobacco companies, has called on the government to introduce a new minimum price for cigarettes in the country. In a statement on Wednesday (10 November), BATSA said that a new floor price will help combat illegal suppliers and improve tax collection in the country. A survey by market...
The Vision for Alternative Development (VALD) has reiterated its call to government of Ghana to ban the sale of single-stick cigarette in the country. It wants government to also make tobacco products very expensive to curb its usage. According to Mr. Labram Musah who is Executive Director at VALD, the sale of cigarette in single stick...
The Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), on Thursday, declared that tobacco industry interference remains a major challenge to effective tobacco control in Nigeria and Africa. CAPPA alerted that the tobacco industry’s meddlesomeness with governments’ health policies was endangering regulatory efforts in clear contravention of the National Tobacco Control Act, 2015, and the National...
On the first day of virtual tobacco treaty talks, Zimbabwe joined a small cadre of countries in delaying meaningful negotiations. Its actions come weeks after a new report found Zimbabwe to be the worst country on the continent in safeguarding public policy from tobacco industry interference. The Zimbabwe delegation raised a range of questions and procedural...
Summary The index by STOP — the global tobacco industry watchdog — shows that regionally, Uganda took fifth position while Kenya came nineth. A total of 31 countries registered a deterioration in the index partly due to the fact that many governments were short of public health resources during the pandemic, which forced them...
Kenyan and other African medics have issued a call through the African Harm Reduction Alliance (AHRA) to the World Health Organisation (WHO) to save millions of cigarette smokers by supporting safer alternatives. The call by the medics comes as the number of cigarette smokers continues to surge in Kenya and Africa, according to the Tobacco...
This COP season, it may be time to draw parallels between two very similar gatherings with diametrically opposite profiles and approaches. Climate change and tobacco-related harms. Both are urgent issues facing humankind. Both are being addressed by global treaties and conventions. For both the problems, a wide range of solutions are coming from old...
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) provisional agenda for its COP9 which is currently ongoing in Geneva, had indicated that any discussions pertaining to tobacco harm reduction (THR) will be moved to COP10 taking place in 2023. The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) provisional agenda for COP9, was released on August 5th, and it had...
On the 2nd of November 2021, the Vapour Products Association of South Africa (VPASA) organized a Diginar (digital seminar) with an unequivocal title: WHO’s (World Health Organization) Dictatorial Tobacco Control Policies Ahead of COP-9. The ninth session of Conference of the Parties (COP 9) is being held from November 8th to 13, 2021. The Framework...
The ninth meeting of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) will be held next week, from Nov. 8-13. FCTC is an international treaty organization, created under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) FCTC’s 180 member countries (“Parties” to the treaty) meet every two years—although last year’s conference was postponed until now due to...
