Big Tobacco Pushes Governments to Weaken Trade Restrictions

Trade Negotiators' Summit In Chicago Opportunity to Put Public Health First

For Immediate Release:
September 8, 2011

Contact:
Christine Chester, 617-695-2525

Chicago—Corporate lobbyists, with the tobacco industry acting as a ringleader, are advocating to loosen trade restrictions that will impact public health, the environment and human rights during a major international trade summit set in Chicago this week.

The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement is on the road to becoming the largest U.S. trade accord since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. In addition to jobs and wages, the agreement will also impede tobacco control, access to medicine, food safety and consumer safety regulations. This week tobacco control advocates are joining the labor, environmental, public health, family farm and consumer movements to demand a Fair Deal or No Deal.

As countries around the globe implement and enforce the global tobacco treaty, formally known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), Big Tobacco is using these trade negotiations in an attempt to undermine tobacco control measures like graphic health warnings and smoke-free policies.

“Tobacco is bad business and no trade treaty should give the tobacco industry extra muscle to peddle its products,” said Ms Bungon Ritthiphakdee the Director of Southeast Asia Tobacco Control, SEATCA. “The transnational tobacco companies want Asia. It is shameful if the TPP is used to undermine our tobacco control measures.”

These negotiations come just weeks after US tobacco corporations filed a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration to challenge newly adopted regulations that protect the US population from tobacco related disease and death. This legal attack in the US is the latest in a broader intimidation strategy by Big Tobacco, which has filed a number of suits using trade law as the basis against countries from Uruguay to Australia. The right of countries to protect the health of their citizens over trade and commercial interests, however, is upheld in numerous bilateral investment treaties and is reinforced in the global tobacco treaty, to which more than 174 countries are party.

“On one hand, the tobacco industry wants the US government to do its bidding during these negotiations and put limitations on global tobacco control efforts; on the other hand, it's suing the US government over recently enacted public health protections,” said Gigi Kellett, director of the Campaign Challenging Big Tobacco with Corporate Accountability International. “Lawsuits like this are an attempt to delay public health protections; it's intimidation by litigation, pure and simple.”

To share an alternative vision and to raise awareness about the dangers of the business as usual approach, global advocates are organizing a public teach-in on the Trans Pacific Free Trade Agreement on Thursday, September 8, at 6:00pm in Roosevelt University's Congress Lounge. And on Saturday, September 10, the United States is hosting a Stakeholder Forum at the Hilton Chicago, during which tobacco control and public health advocates will give presentations on the potential negative consequences of using these negotiations as a forum to weaken international, regional and domestic tobacco control laws.

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Corporate Accountability International, formerly Infact, is a membership organization that protects people by waging and winning campaigns challenging irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions around the world. For 30 years, the organization has compelled corporations—like Nestlé, General Electric and Philip Morris/Altria—to halt a range of abuses. Corporate Accountability is an NGO in Official Relations with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and has Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).