Public Health on Top

BATB is entrapping youth in its death-marketing gradually. The Battle of Mind is hard to deal with. The BATB, in guise of employment, has already launched the BoM 2017 registration process amid great festivity to spread tobacco use among youths. The grand finale will be held after a couple of months. Remarkably, BATB has employed only 115 in past 13 years (since 2004- 2016) among thousands of candidates but has spent a lot after the event promotion. This is a testimony of tobacco companies’ desperate attitude. Tobacco companies have already hampered the lawful implementation of Graphic Health Warning (GHW) on tobacco packets in Bangladesh. Based on the High Court verdict, from September 19, 2017 the GHW was supposed to be implemented covering 50 percent upper portion of all tobacco packets and the decision has been postponed till November 30, 2017.
On the other side, the National Board of Revenue (NBR) is also turning unconcerned to public health. Recently, the NBR issued a SRO exempting export duty for tobacco manufacturers in Export Processing Zones (EPZ). Notably, export duty on tobacco and other tobacco products has been raised to 25 percent from 10 in this fiscal year (2017-18) based on the demands of anti-tobacco activists. Tobacco companies are using Bangladesh as their supply hub as the developed countries are trying to stop tobacco farming. Such duty exemption will increase tobacco farming and will cast prejudicial impacts on food security, forests and over all environment and ecology.
Such attempts from tobacco companies should be prevented if we want to make the country tobacco-free by 2040 after the pledge of Prime Minister.