Public Health on Top

A bill titled ‘The control of essential commodities (Amendment) Act, 2021’ has been proposed to remove cigarettes from the list of essential commodities. However, to thwart the amendment process, cigarette companies have already started intense lobbying in relevant ministries. It should be noted that, in April 2020, citing cigarettes as essential commodity on the basis of the 1956 Essential Commodities Act, the Ministry of Industries (MoInd) has granted special permissions to two multinational companies to continue operations as usual despite nationwide lockdown. The Ministry did not budge from its decision despite protests from anti-tobacco activities and request from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW). To prevent recurrence of such incident, Mr. Saber Hossain Chowdhury MP, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Environment, Forestry and Climate Change, has recently initiated a bill in the parliament to repeal Clause (XX) of the 1956 Act, thus ending cigarettes' status as essential commodity.
Bangladesh Cigarette Manufacturing Association (BCMA) has, very recently, been invited as a stakeholder in a meeting to advance the execution of 'tobacco control guidelines for local government'. This has caused an outcry among the anti-tobacco activists of the country, who urged the authority not to involve BCMA in the process as it would be a violation of WHO FCTC. The concerns raised have not been taken into account and the authority went along with its plan.
Apart from these above-mentioned moves, tobacco companies have started paid media campaigns to thwart the ongoing amendment process of tobacco control law through spreading false and baseless information among the people and policymakers.
In order to achieve a tobacco-free Bangladesh at the earliest, necessary amendments should be brought to the tobacco control law. At the same time, cigarettes must be excluded from the list of essential commodities and tobacco control guidelines for local government bodies should also be implemented. But, none of these measures will come to fruition if we leave government institutions vulnerable to the interference of tobacco industry. Implementation of FCTC Article 5.3 is a must in this regard.