The treaty envisages an international tracking system which aims to halt the smuggling and counterfeiting of tobacco products — a trade which accounts for 11 percent of the total tobacco market and costs governments an estimated $40 billion in lost tax revenue.

“This is a game-changing treaty,” Chan said in an address to a meeting in Seoul of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which has been ratified by 176 countries since coming into force in 2005.

“This is how we hem in the enemy,” she added, calling the pact a major step towards “eliminating a very sophisticated criminal activity”.

The protocol gives signatory states five years to establish a tracking and tracing mechanism on cigarettes and every other tobacco product. The system will use non-removable markings and will be coordinated globally to detect illegal tobacco trading.

Agents, suppliers and tobacco manufacturers will all have to be licensed. Manufacturers will have to carry out checks on customers to ensure they are genuine or if they have associations with criminal organisations.

In her address Monday, Chan lambasted the tobacco industry for seeking to “maintain its profits and kill at the same time” and accused it of complicity in the illicit tobacco trade.

“It is a ruthless industry that quite literally cannot afford to lose.

“It behaves like a corrosive substance that can eat and slip through any cracks or fissures in the armour of our defences,” she said.

Monday’s pact marks a departure for the FCTC, whose main focus so far has been on curbing demand for tobacco products rather than controlling the supply chain.

The Framework Convention Alliance (FCA), which groups around 300 non-government organisations working for tobacco control, said it was “excited” by the adoption of the pact, which required four years of intense negotiations.

“The illicit trade in tobacco feeds the worldwide tobacco epidemic by flooding markets with cheap producers and keeping tobacco taxes low,” said FCA director Laurence Huber.

The six-day FCTC meeting in the South Korean capital will also review guidelines on tax measures to reduce tobacco demand, recommendations on promoting alternatives to tobacco growing, and regulation of smokeless tobacco products like e-cigarettes.

See this article at its original location>

The treaty entered into force in February 2005. It was signed by 168 of the 192 WHO member states and today there are  more than 170 WHO member states have become Parties to the convention. The United States has not yet become a Party to the treaty.

The FCTC is a legally binding treaty that requires countries bound by the treaty or Parties  to implement evidence-based measures to reduce tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke. When effectively implemented, the FCTC is a powerful tool to reduce the devastating global consequences of tobacco products on health, lives and economies.

The FCTC sets out specific steps for governments addressing tobacco use, including to:

• Enact and undertake comprehensive bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship;

•  Ban misleading and deceptive terms on cigarette packaging such as “light”, “low-tar” and “mild”;

• Implement rotating health warnings on tobacco packaging that covers at least 30 percent (ideally 50 percent or more) of the display areas – this may include pictures or pictograms;

• Protect people from tobacco smoke exposure on public transport, and indoor work and public places;

• Adopt or maintain taxation policies aimed at reducing tobacco consumption; and

• Combat illicit trade in tobacco products. This requires monitoring, documenting and controlling product movement as well as including origin and destination information on packaging plus enacting legislation with appropriate penalties and remedies.

More about ASHs role with the treaty>

See WHO’s FAQ on the Treaty >

Coming soon…What is COP?

Share the FCA video>

Click here to visit the FCA site>

We have also seen increased demand in cessation support, in the form of a short intervention by a health care provider, counselling, or other treatment modality.

However, medical practitioners and tobacco cessation specialists express the concern:  “It is so difficult for a smoker in my country to have access to quitting support once they make the move to quit.” This is typically followed by “so they often give up and keep on smoking because it is cheaper for them in the short term.”

A number of global health governance tools and global advocacy opportunities can help secure resources for tobacco treatment at the local level.

The medical community can help advocate at the national and global levels.

This advocacy can create a global mechanism that will help secure resources for treatment and reach the objectives set by the UN Summit on Non Communicable Diseases.

Following the UN Summit in Sept 2011, the World Health Assembly adopted a global target calling for a 25% reduction in preventable deaths from NCDs by 2025.

Given tobacco is a leading risk factor for NCDs, this target can be achieved only if we address the tobacco epidemic through a number of interventions such as a ban on tobacco product advertising, tax and price measures to reduce smoking prevalence, smoke free policies and ensuring that smokers have access to treatment.

We expect that in September, a target will be approved demanding a 30% reduction in global smoking prevalence by 2015.

We need to use these targets in all of our advocacy efforts as we hold our governments accountable to these commitments.

The upcoming 5th Conference of the Parties (COP5) of the FCTC (November 2012) in Seoul, Korea, provides a unique opportunity to address the lack of resources for tobacco control, including resources for the treatment of tobacco dependence.

The meeting will provide more than 170 governments a platform to discuss and explore solutions to address the lack of resources for implementation of tobacco control measures.

It is crucial that governments agree at COP5 to set up a process that reviews the barriers countries face and develop solutions to address them.

The FCA proposes that governments move forward with the development of a working group that will review the implementation of the treaty, review mechanisms of assistance for implementation of the treaty, and identify implementation challenges as well as provide assistance to overcome them.

Another problem we face is that Non Communicable Diseases  (NCDs ) — which include Cardiovascular, Cancer and Chronic Lung Diseases, for which tobacco is the leading risk factor — are absent from the development agenda and global development goals such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

This has led to a lack of resources for treatment of tobacco addiction from the major development agencies such as USAID, CIDA, DFID and other major development donors.

The MDGs are up for review as they expire in 2015, and this process, along with the outcomes of the UN Summit on NCDs, provides a unique opportunity to address the lack of treatment resources.

Our strategy should be to move from a current over- dependence on philanthropic funding to development aid in countries that need it, followed by fiscal independence at the national level for tobacco control programs through taxation of tobacco products.

There are examples from other fields that could be applied to tobacco in the area of development and prevention of NCDs.

There is an interesting example from Sweden, where they are attempting to move from only addressing pathogenesis to addressing salutogenesis.

Sweden found it to be cost effective to implement interventions through the medical community that encourages sedentary individuals to change their behaviour and exercise.

When a patient visits a doctor, they are asked if they exercise, frequency, intensity etc…

If the patient says they do not exercise, then a referral is made to a motivational therapist, a personal trainer, etc…

Based on the success of these interventions, they developed a pilot program through the Swedish Development Agency, and funds were made available to start a similar project in Vietnam.

These types of programs could be developed for tobacco control by integrating cessation measures along with other tobacco control measures in the development agenda of donor agencies.

For this to happen, the medical community will need to advocate in both donor countries as well as low and middle countries.

The medical community can engage in these processes by staying attuned to the development of the FCTC COP campaigns.

You can do this by visiting the Framework Convention Alliance web site and by following the FCTC Action Now! campaign.

You may recall earlier this year when the U.S. lost a legal appeal over its ban on candy flavorings for cigarettes, flavorings clearly meant to attract children to start smoking. The plaintiff in that case was the nation of Indonesia, which exports a lot of clove-flavored “bidis” to the U.S. The court was an international trade tribunal formed by the World Trade Organization. Under WTO rules, a country may drag another country to court over any laws that it feels violate trade rules. The decisions are binding, and the trade tribunals’ final decisions cannot be overruled, even by the U.S. Supreme Court.

ISDS creates a similar right to sue over any law that impacts trade, except that it allows any corporation to sue a country in an international trade tribunal. In the example above, the Indonesian tobacco industry would not have needed to convince the government to sue on its behalf. It could do so on its own. And the suits need not be against federal laws. They could go after state and local tobacco laws and regulations as well.

The reason this is particularly problematic for tobacco is that the tobacco industry has publicly stated that its strategy is to sue even when they don’t have a good case, just to impose an economic punishment on governments who try to reduce smoking. Trade cases cost millions of dollars each, win or lose. The federal government may be able to afford a vigorous defense, but states, counties and cities already facing historic deficits are a different story. Industry’s goal is to “chill” governments from passing tobacco control laws in the first place, just to avoid costly court cases.

For a real life example of what ISDS can mean in the face of a cynical, rich industry, read about Australia’s experience>