Cigarette causing big health issue in Pakistan - Which politicians are supporting those Big Mulitnational companies?
- Thread starter CaptainPakistan
- Start date
CaptainPakistan
Minister (2k+ posts)
All these multi billion dollars companies heavily targetting 3rd world countries
They almost lost all of their revenues in first world countries
This has brought MASSIVE health crisis everywhere
number one reason for cancer
Eyeaan
Chief Minister (5k+ posts)
The tobacco business is bad for the health and no doubt they are enjoying huge growth in the third world countries. They are using all sort of influences on the lawmakers of the respective countries to expand their business. However, the situation is not quite clear about linking of the declining domestic market to the global market expansion. From the Tobacco Control :
"There is no doubt that the multinational tobacco companies have moved aggressively into the world's poorer nations in recent years, often attempting to develop an indigenous tobacco industry (tobacco farming and/or finished product manufacturing), always trying to expand tobacco product consumption. In countries with a longstanding tradition of smoking, the industry employs sophisticated marketing techniques to compete with domestic brands of cigarettes, increase daily consumption among existing smokers, and encourage traditionally low smoking groups to “modernise” by becoming smokers (for example, young women in many Asian societies).. According to the one empirical study that has examined its impact, the introduction of modern western advertising in Asia increased cigarette consumption by about 10%.
Many tobacco control advocates believe that the multinationals' move into developing countries is a direct result of declining markets at home. Cigarette consumption is falling gradually in the most industrialised nations (about 1.5% per year); it is increasing in low and middle income countries (about 2.1% per year).56 The logic seems almost inescapable: as the profit balloon is squeezed in the developed nations, the industry's activity necessarily bulges out into the less exploited and hence more promising developing country markets. The corollary is that success in controlling tobacco use in the First World exacerbates the tobacco epidemic in Second and Third World nations. Thus, policy and other tobacco control victories in western countries are blemished by their inevitable negative repercussions for the rest of the world. A cause otherwise to be celebrated is converted, at least in part, into a reason to feel guilt. This was a primary concern in the international community during the debate in the US on the proposed comprehensive settlement of lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
Although the argument sounds compelling, there is no evidence to support it. Tobacco profits are not a zero sum game. Rather, they are whatever the tobacco industry can make them, subject to the laws of supply and demand and interventions of governments, helpful or otherwise. No rational profit maximising firm would await diminished profit at home before venturing abroad into lands promising new opportunities for profit. To the contrary, all profit oriented firms will seek out profits wherever and whenever they are available.
Although there is a correlation between declining tobacco consumption in the west and industry expansion into the east, no evidence points to causation. A better explanation of the multinationals' contemporaneous move into other countries is the development of a fortuitous set of economic circumstances: the general easing of trade barriers for all international commerce59 (a function of technological and economic improvements in product distribution and marketing, as well as the easing of legal impediments); the emergence of a level of consumer income in such countries adequate to support consumption of western cigarettes; and the bulging treasuries of multinational tobacco companies that permit expansion overseas.
Lost in the conventional wisdom is the fact that declining consumption in western nations is not always accompanied by declining profits. In the US, over the past quarter century during which per capita consumption has fallen by more than a third, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds have frequently reported new record annual profits. Every time the companies increase their wholesale prices, they decrease their sales but increase their immediate profits, a reflection of the fact that the demand for cigarettes in the US is inelastic. Thus, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds can raise their prices and increase profits at the same time that they bemoan decreases in cigarettes smoked. (One might wonder why, if this is true, the companies do not increase their prices all the way to the point that profits are maximised. The answer likely lies in the distinction between short run and long run profit maximisation for an addictive substance. Prices that maximise profits in the short run may drive enough new and potential customers out of the market so as to decrease future (long run) profits. Interestingly, as tobacco control efforts succeed in reducing the prospects for the marketing of cigarettes in the future, the cigarette companies may choose to raise prices more in the pursuit of short run profit maximisation.
To put the general issue into perspective, the United States—one of the principal villains in this piece—includes about 4% of the world's 1.1 billion tobacco consumers. A small decline in US consumption, even were it to reduce profits, would have a barely discernible impact on the number of tobacco consumers worldwide (for example, a 10% decline in the number of US smokers would reduce the world's tobacco consuming population by about 0.4%). Even if tobacco consumption were expanding in the US, the modest potential effect on global industry profits would still mean that companies seeking future profit centres would necessarily look overseas. In a profit driven global marketplace, the multinational tobacco companies intensify their pursuit of foreign markets independent of their successes or failures in First World countries."
