Public Health on Top

Tobacco companies have already launched a coordinated campaign to influence the policymakers and obstruct the passage of the tobacco control law amendment. On 18 September 2022, the National Small and Cottage Industries Association of Bangladesh (NASCIB) sent a letter addressed to the Honorable Prime Minister, seeking the Premier's intervention to repeal a number of proposals from the draft amendment. The draft proposals that NASCIB has found as objectionable include mandating retail licenses to sell cigarettes and other tobacco products, banning floating shopkeepers from selling tobacco and tobacco products, eliminating designated smoking areas (DSAs), banning the display of tobacco products at points-of-sale, and banning the sale of loose sticks.

The initiative to amend the tobacco control law was rooted in the Honorable Prime Minister's vision to build a tobacco-free country by 2040 and her directive to make the existing law more compliant with the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) of the World Health Organization (WHO). However, tobacco companies have now started various ill tactics to thwart the government's amendment initiative. We hope that the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) would finalize the draft law at the earliest.

In addition to NASCIB's bid to derail the ongoing amendment initiative, multinational tobacco company British American Tobacco Bangladesh (BATB) has also written a letter addressed to the Senior Secretary of the Ministry of Commerce where the company sought duty-free quota facility to export cigarettes under the Bangladesh-Bhutan preferential trade agreement (PTA). The letter sought the Ministry’s action to include cigarettes in the list of products granted duty-free access to the Bhutanese market under the PTA. However, any benefit granted to expand the tobacco business is in grave conflict with the vision of a tobacco-free Bangladesh. We demand that the government rejects BATB's request for duty-free access to the Bhutanese market and facilitate the building of a tobacco-free Bangladesh.