Domestic Tobacco Research Articles

The Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation: To ‘join the ranks of global companies’

ABSTRACTUntil the late 1990s, the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation (TTL) focused almost exclusively on serving the domestic market as a highly protected monopoly. This paper describes how the company has adopted a more outward looking strategy since 2000, with ambitions to become a regional, and eventually global, business by 2021. Drawing on company documents and industry sources, the paper argues that this shift in strategy was a direct reaction to the decline in domestic market share following liberalisation of the Taiwanese tobacco market and adoption of tougher domestic tobacco control measures. Market opening occurred as a result of pressure from the U.S. Trade Representative in the 1980s, as well as World Trade Organization membership in 2002. It is argued that TTL’s efforts to globalise operations have been limited by bureaucratic company management and structures, and ongoing political tension between Taiwan and China. However, the relative success of TTL’s alcohol branch, and potential détente as the Taiwanese government reaches out to improve relations with China, may provide TTL with new opportunities to achieve its goal of becoming a regional player with global ambitions. This article is part of the special issue ‘The Emergence of Asian Tobacco Companies: Implications for Global Health Governance.’

ANALISIS USAHATANI TEMBAKAU POLA KEMITRAAN DAN MANDIRI DI DESA LAMUK KECAMATAN TLOGOMULYO KABUPATEN TEMANGGUNG

One of the plantation sub-sector is now growing quite significantly is tobacco, where most farmers grow tobacco because this plant is considered to provide more added value when compared to other subsectors. Temanggung is known for quality tobacco than the tobacco of any area. To overcome the problem of capital and other issues, the majority of tobacco farmers in Temanggung working with the company’s domestic tobacco industry. Through this business partnership is expected to be fast so that the mutualistic symbiosis flaws and limitatation faced by tobacco farmers can be resolved. This study aims to : (1) knowing the production and the factors that influence the producton of tobacco and independent partnership (2) tp find out the income and factors that affect farm income on tobacco and independent partnership (3) to find out the allocative efficiency of input use on tobacco farming and independent partnership (4) knowing the risks of production and the risk of tobacco farm income.This study uses secondary data and primary by taking 60 farmers sample of 30 farmers and 30 farmers partnership patterns independently. To determine tha factors affecting farm production and income patterns of tobacco use and independent partnership Ordinary Least Square regression (OLS), to know the iffernce between the tobacco farm income and independent partnership used different test, to determine the allocative efficiency an production risk and income risk using coeffisien variation.Based on the result of the analysis indicate that the factors that influence the production is labor, the amount of organic fertilizer, the amount of inorganic fertilizrr, pesticides and dummy partnership, while the factors that affect revenue is the price of pesticide, land area, and dummy partnership. From the test resultas show the efficiency, not allocative efficient. Production risk and the risk of partnership income of farmers is higher than the patterm of independent farmers.

The Structure of Cigarette Excises in the EU: From Myths to Reality

Although it may at first seem unimportant, the structure of excise taxes on cigarettes greatly affects the price of cigarettes, the structure of the consumption, but also the amount of the tax revenue. EU Directive 2011/64/EU prescribes the combination of the specific and the proportional (ad valorem) excise tax on cigarettes. However, Member States independently determine the shares of one or another component in the overall excise tax structure, whereby the EU directive only prescribes the upper and the lower limit. The purpose of this article is to challenge several myths related to the cigarette taxation in the EU. The first one is that an increase of the specific component of the cigarette excise negatively affects the consumption of cigarettes, whereas this does not hold for the proportional component. The second assumption empirically tested in the paper is that an increase of the specific excise increases the government revenue from cigarette excises, whereby this can not be confirmed for the proportional component. Lastly, since both previous hypotheses have been confirmed, we tried to delve into reasons why certain countries – despite obvious advantages of the specific in relation to proportional excise – still predominantly rely on the latter. To this end, we tested the assumption that countries with domestic production of tobacco increasingly use proportional excises to increase the price gap between domestic (usually cheaper) and more expensive (imported/international) brands. The results of the empirical analysis were consistent with this hypothesis and confirmed that domestic tobacco production is a significant determinant of the structure of cigarette excises.

ED12.02 Tobacco Control: The Turkish Experience

ED12.02 Tobacco Control: The Turkish Experience

The Share Price Effect of CVS Health's Announcement to Stop Selling Tobacco: A Comparative Case Study Using Synthetic Controls.

We study how the announcement by CVS Health, a large US-based pharmacy chain, to stop selling tobacco products affected its share price and that of its close competitors, as well as major tobacco companies. Combining event study and synthetic control methodologies we compare measures of CVS's stock market valuation with those of a peer group consisting of large publicly listed firms that are part of Standard & Poor's S&P 500 stock market index. CVS's announcement is associated with a short-term decrease in its share price, whereas close competitors have benefitted from CVS' decision. We also find a negative share price effect for Altria, the largest US domestic tobacco firm. Overall our findings are consistent with markets expecting consumers to shift from CVS to alternative outlets in the short-run, and interpreting CVS' decision to drop tobacco products as signal that other firms may follow suit.

Race and Tobacco Use: A Global Perspective.

These findings suggest that there are no "fixed" racial patterns of tobacco use around the globe. Cross-country differences in tobacco use among races could be modified by cultural influences, domestic tobacco control, or socioeconomic factors. There is need for enhanced efforts to monitor tobacco use by race/ethnicity to identify existing and emerging patterns in tobacco use by race, as well as identify opportunities for interventions. Tailored interventions to reduce tobacco use within different settings and countries may help reduce tobacco use among racial/ethnic minorities. Implementation of comprehensive tobacco control measures could be facilitated by community-based efforts, ensuring that disadvantaged populations are engaged as partners to adapt tobacco control policies and interventions to local contexts and health equity issues.

Powdery mildew resistance in the Japanese domestic tobacco cultivar Kokubu is associated with aberrant splicing of MLO orthologues

The Japanese domestic tobacco cultivar Kokubu (syn. Kou‐fan) is highly resistant to powdery mildew, and this trait is controlled by recessive alleles at two loci. To show the molecular mechanism of powdery mildew resistance of Kokubu, the transcripts and genomic sequences of tobacco Mildew resistance locus O (MLO) orthologues were compared between powdery mildew‐resistant and ‐susceptible cultivars. Two MLO orthologues (NtMLO1 and NtMLO2) corresponding to powdery mildew susceptibility were expressed in tobacco leaves. However, the transcripts of both NtMLO genes in the powdery mildew‐resistant cultivars harboured partial deletions or insertions. In a genomic DNA sequence alignment analysis, mutations in intron regions were detected in both NtMLO genes of powdery mildew‐resistant cultivars, and these mutations were linked to the powdery mildew‐resistant phenotype. Transgenic Kokubu expressing wildtype NtMLO1 or NtMLO2 exhibited severe disease symptoms, the same as those in susceptible cultivars. These results indicate that mutations of intron regions of two NtMLO genes in powdery mildew resistant cultivar Kokubu trigger the aberrant splicing of MLO transcripts and the subsequent inhibition of functional MLO protein synthesis, and that NtMLO1 and NtMLO2 are functionally redundant.

Cigarette Marketing and Smoking Culture in 1930s Canada

This paper examines political-economic, cultural, and marketing changes during the 1930s that solidified the domestic tobacco industry and cigarette smoking as a socially normative practice. During this decade, farm production of cigarette tobacco grew exponentially in southern Ontario, as did cigarette manufacturing operations, mostly in Montréal. Cigarette marketing and advertising were prolific, as evidenced by the bevy of premium promotions, gift rebates, sports sponsorships, and athlete and celebrity testimonial advertising. Women, for the first time, were routinely targeted by cigarette advertising, and their entry into the ranks of “legitimate” smokers proved a watershed for tobacco manufacturers. Two specific developments further boosted the long-term viability of the cigarette industry. First, Canada’s dominant tobacco firm, Imperial Tobacco, spent heavily on public relations advertising to overcome public criticism of its cut-throat merchandising practices. Second, menthol and filtered cigarettes first appeared in the 1930s, ads for which reassured smokers worried about sore throats and persistent coughs. Long before the tobacco industry’s massive public relations response in the 1950s to the “cancer scare” (which included the heavy promotion of filtered brands as “safer” cigarettes), Imperial Tobacco, among others, was versed in issue-management public relations and forms of cigarette “health marketing.”

Domestic Tobacco Regulation and International Law: The Interaction of Trade Agreements and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control

For the most part, conflict between domestic tobacco regulation/international tobacco control instruments and international trade obligations is more imaginary than real. In practice, domestic regulation can be carried out consistently with trade obligations. Nevertheless, there is at least a small chance of actual conflict between international tobacco rules and trade obligations. Where such conflict arises, this paper argues that proper treaty interpretation requires that trade obligations, as the 'harder' version of law, would take precedence over conflicting tobacco rules. For public health advocates who have concerns about this, the solution is not to exclude tobacco from trade agreements, but to refine existing trade obligations.

Punching Above Their Weight Through Policy Learning: Tobacco Control Policies in Ireland

Ireland's tobacco control policy today is recognised as one of the strongest in Europe and the world, largely on the basis of its first-in-the-world general workplace smoking ban in 2004. However, it is insufficiently recognised that Ireland has persistently and deliberately developed tobacco control policies since the 1970s, a longer period than most countries. Using a five-fold analysis of factors influencing tobacco policy: agendas, socio-economic setting (including public opinion), networks, institutions, and ideas (including scientific information and diffusion), this paper explains policy development in Ireland over the long term. It demonstrates how a small country, not dependent on tobacco growing or a domestic tobacco industry but also having only a small research and bureaucratic capacity, has managed to create a strong tobacco control policy. Even though it is a European Union member, Ireland has utilised diffusion of research and policy in the English-speaking world, especially paying close attention to the USA, to develop its position as a world policy leader in tobacco control.

Protecting the autonomy of states to enact tobacco control measures under trade and investment agreements

Since the adoption of the WHO's WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, governments have been pursuing progressively stronger and more wide-reaching tobacco control measures. In response, tobacco companies are frequently...

Call to action: promoting domestic and global tobacco control by ratifying the framework convention on tobacco control in the United States.

Tim K. Mackey and colleagues outline why the United States should ratify the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

Why FCTC Policies Have Not Been Implemented in China: Domestic Dynamics and Tobacco Governance

The international community, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, developed the landmark Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) to curb the global tobacco epidemic. As an internationally binding convention about global best practices on tobacco control, the FCTC has become an overriding source of policy transfer for developing countries in the fight against smoking. However, since its ratification of the first global norm over tobacco governance and against the grim background of the widespread tobacco-induced public health devastation within its borders, China has failed to genuinely pursue FCTC policies because of domestic political and social factors. The empirical findings of this article point to the dominance of political-social dynamics for China's nontransfer of FCTC policies, arguing that the government's GDPism, its sovereignty-first mentality, and hostility to NGOs as well as widespread social acceptability of tobacco consumption and high smoking prevalence are fundamental causes of China's nontransfer of FCTC policies. The article explicates how these variables correspond to FCTC policies in an analytic framework of policy transfer.

The Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Tax Avoidance and Illicit Trade in Vietnam, 1998-2010

Illicit trade carries the potential to magnify existing tobacco-related health care costs through increased availability of untaxed and inexpensive cigarettes. What is known with respect to the magnitude of illicit trade for Vietnam is produced primarily by the industry, and methodologies are typically opaque. Independent assessment of the illicit cigarette trade in Vietnam is vital to tobacco control policy. This paper measures the magnitude of illicit cigarette trade for Vietnam between 1998 and 2010 using two methods, discrepancies between legitimate domestic cigarette sales and domestic tobacco consumption estimated from surveys, and trade discrepancies as recorded by Vietnam and trade partners. The results indicate that Vietnam likely experienced net smuggling in during the period studied. With the inclusion of adjustments for survey respondent under-reporting, inward illicit trade likely occurred in three of the four years for which surveys were available. Discrepancies in trade records indicate that the value of smuggled cigarettes into Vietnam ranges from $100 million to $300 million between 2000 and 2010 and that these cigarettes primarily originate in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, Malaysia, and Australia. Notable differences in trends over time exist between the two methods, but by comparison, the industry estimates consistently place the magnitude of illicit trade at the upper bounds of what this study shows. The unavailability of annual, survey-based estimates of consumption may obscure the true, annual trend over time. Second, as surveys changed over time, estimates relying on them may be inconsistent with one another. Finally, these two methods measure different components of illicit trade, specifically consumption of illicit cigarettes regardless of origin and smuggling of cigarettes into a particular market. However, absent a gold standard, comparisons of different approaches to illicit trade measurement serve efforts to refine and improve measurement approaches and estimates.

Chemical characterization of domestic oral tobacco products: total nicotine, pH, unprotonated nicotine and tobacco-specific N-nitrosamines.

In the United States, moist snuff has been studied more widely than other distinct categories of oral tobacco. In this study, we measured pH, moisture, nicotine (total and unprotonated), and tobacco-specific N-nitrosamines (TSNAs) for other established (twist, loose leaf, plug, and dry snuff without pouch) and emerging oral tobacco products (dry snuff pouch, US-made snus, and dissolvable tobacco). Among the seven product categories, product pH ranged from 4.7 to 7.9, and total nicotine concentration spanned from 3.9 to 40.1 mg/g. The most readily absorbable form of nicotine (unprotonated nicotine) varied more than 350-fold, ranging from 0.01 to 3.7 mg/g. While the highest total nicotine concentrations were observed in twist products, snus and dissolvable tobacco had the highest unprotonated nicotine levels. Among all products, total TSNA concentrations ranged from 313 to 76,500 ng/g with dry snuff having the highest total TSNA concentrations. This study demonstrates the diversity among oral tobacco products and highlights the potential of these products to deliver a wide range of nicotine and carcinogenic TSNAs. Characterizing the chemical content of these products may be helpful in further understanding the risk of marketing these products to oral tobacco users and smokers as an alternative and discrete form of tobacco.

Adaptation of a general primary care package for HIV‐infected adults to an HIV centre setting in Gaborone, Botswana

As life expectancy of HIV-infected patients improves due to antiretroviral treatment (ART) and the importance of associated co-morbidities and chronic diseases increases, preventive care will become increasingly important. Adaptation of existing preventive guidelines to local environments will become a priority for HIV treatment programmes. Guidance from the World Health Organization, a focused evidenced-based literature review, Botswana national guidelines, Botswana-specific morbidity and mortality data and centre-specific data were used to adapt a published general primary care package for limited-resource areas to our centre's specific setting. The preventive care package contains recommendations on tuberculosis prevention, malnutrition, depression, cervical and breast cancer, hepatitis B coinfection, cardiovascular risk factors, external injury prevention, domestic violence screening, tobacco and substance-abuse counselling, contraception and screening and treatment of sexually transmitted infections. This preventive care package addresses the comprehensive health needs of HIV-infected adults in the FMC in an evidence-based manner. The process of combining clinic-specific prevalence data, national guidelines, regional literature and assessment of public-sector resources to adapt an existing general package could be utilised to develop similar guidelines in other resource-limited locales.

Explaining Socioeconomic Inequalities in Childhood Blood Pressure and Prehypertension

Much remains to be understood about the socioeconomic inequalities in hypertension that continue to exist. We investigated the association of socioeconomic status with blood pressure and prehypertension in childhood. In a prospective cohort, 3024 five- to six-year–old children had blood pressure measurements and available information on potential explanatory factors, namely birth weight, gestational age, smoking during pregnancy, pregnancy-induced hypertension, familial hypertension, maternal body mass index, breastfeeding duration, domestic tobacco exposure, and body mass index. The systolic and diastolic blood pressures of children from mid-educated women were 1.0-mm Hg higher (95% CI, 0.4–1.7) and 0.9-mm Hg higher (95% CI, 0.3–1.4), and the blood pressures of children with low-educated women were 2.2-mm Hg higher (95% CI, 1.4–3.0) and 1.7-mm Hg higher (95% CI, 1.1–2.4) compared with children with high-educated women. Children with mid- (odds ratio, 1.50; 95% CI, 1.18–1.92) or low-educated mothers (odds ratio, 1.80; 95% CI, 1.35–2.42) were more likely to have prehypertension compared with children with high-educated mothers. Using path analyses, birth weight, breastfeeding duration, and body mass index were determined as having a role in the association of maternal education with offspring blood pressure and prehypertension. The socioeconomic gradient in hypertension appears to emerge from childhood as the results show a higher blood pressure and more prehypertension in children from lower socioeconomic status families. Socioeconomic disparities could be reduced by improving 3 factors in particular, namely birth weight, breastfeeding duration, and body mass index, but other factors might also play a role.

Tobacco pollen: archaeological and forensic applications

The fossil pollen contents found in the charred dottle residue from 20 clay pipe bowls recovered from a cesspit at a house in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (which was owned and used by the artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn), were collected and studied. The clay pipes date from approximately the same period when Rembrandt lived in the house and used the cesspit. We believe that some of the pollen in the dottle residue may have come from the tobacco, some possibly from airborne sources at Rembrandt's house and/or from debris in the cesspit in which the pipes were discarded. The results are compared with a similar study of pipe dottle from Native American clay pipes conducted more than 25 years ago. We also briefly review the origin and spread of domestic tobacco in an effort to determine potential sources of the tobacco imported and used in the Netherlands during the lifetime of Rembrandt and the period when he occupied the house. The pollen content of modern brands of commercial pipe tobacco is studied and the potential for using pollen found in tobacco products as evidence in forensic circumstances is reviewed.

Creating demand for foreign brands in a ‘home run’ market: tobacco company tactics in South Korea following market liberalisation

ObjectiveTo analyse the tactics transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) used to increase market share in South Korea after market liberalisation in 1988, and the subsequent impact of TTCs’ activities on the...

Adjusted Effects of Domestic Violence, Tobacco use, and Indoor Air Pollution from Use of Solid Fuel on Child Mortality

Studies that have separately examined the consequences of gender based violence upon women, use of solid fuel for cooking, and mother and father's use of tobacco on child health have concluded that they serve as risk factors for maternal and child health. Some authors have implied that these studies may have run the risk of overestimating the burden of disease of one factor over another. In this paper, we included all four factors in the same model to estimate their adjusted effects on child mortality, controlling for the demographic factors. The data come from 2005 to 2006 National Family Health Survey of India that interviewed a nationally representative sample of 39,257 couples. Of the four factors, mothers' use of tobacco presented the highest risk for child mortality (OR=1.42; CI=1.27-1.60) followed by fathers' use of tobacco (OR=1.23; CI=1.12-1.36), households' use of solid fuel for cooking (OR=1.23; CI=1.06-1.43), and physical abuse upon mothers (OR=1.20; CI=1.10-1.32). Among the households that used solid fuel for cooking, improved cookstoves users experienced 28% lower odds of child mortality (OR=0.72; CI=0.61-0.86) compared to nonusers of improved cookstoves. Additionally, increase in age of mothers at birth of first child, parents' education, and household wealth served as protective factors for child mortality. To prevent child death, programs should focus on reducing couple's use of tobacco, protecting women from physical abuse, and helping households switch from solid to liquid fuel. Moreover, a significant reduction in child death could be attained by improving girls' education, and delaying their age at marriage and first birth.