Priority and Action

Tobacco Cultivation:

Due to the allurements by the Tobacco Companies, tobacco cultivation has been spreading alarmingly across the country. In 2014, about 108,000 hectares of lands have been used for tobacco cultivation that is almost three times greater than the lands that used in the previous year (Daily Dhaka Tribune, January 2014). If the current incremental trends of tobacco cultivation persist, the country will fall victim to a long-run socioeconomic losses including food scarcity, environmental degradation, deforestation, health hazards of farmers, bio-diversity damage and soil fertility reduction etc. will be frequent. Unfortunately, these aggressions are made by tobacco companies and the country does not have any effective set of rules to combat them. Moreover, there is a serious lack of policy awareness among stakeholders to regulate tobacco cultivation. Therefore, the main strategy of the campaign will be to create policy awareness about the need for effectively regulating the tobacco industry by exposing its ploy to trap farmers for expansion of tobacco cultivation.

PROGGA has already mapped out some priority issues for exposing tobacco industry tactics through media (investigative reporting, earned media activities, social media programmes), advocacy programs, research and networking. Through different print, online and broadcast media, the campaigner will unveil how tobacco industries are putting farmers into debt trap by giving them so called ‘special incentives’ like advance payments (cash and kinds) and soft-loans and agro-inputs etc. for tobacco cultivation. It will also expose aggressive measures of tobacco industries by ignoring country’s socioeconomic losses to expand tobacco cultivation. Besides, it will conduct regular research to find out the real stories of victims of tobacco cultivation to circulate them through different social media outlets. Finally, all the evidences (media pieces and the research findings) will be used in policy advocacy programs for influencing the policy makers to undertake effective measures in regulating the tobacco industry in Bangladesh, and hence reversing the trend of increasing tobacco cultivation in the country. The overall campaign for discrediting the tobacco industry will cover other issues as well, but the particular objective will be under lens.

 

TAPS Ban:

Although Tobacco Advertisement Promotion and Sponsorship (TAPS) is completely prohibited in Bangladesh under ‘Smoking and Using Tobacco Products (Control) (Amended) Act 2013’, both the domestic and international Tobacco Companies are running promotional campaign of their products in disguise at sales points across the country which is hampering the commoners to get the benefit of the tobacco control law. Thus, it is very urgent to de-normalize tobacco industry through creating policy level and mass awareness about various promotional tactics of the industry including violations of tobacco control law with regard to advertising, promotion and sponsorship to get optimum benefit of tobacco control law.

The campaigner will monitor and discredit the tobacco industry’s activities and will upload the exposed events regularly on assigned web portal. The campaign will mostly highlight violations of tobacco control law with regard to TAPS done by tobacco industry across the country. This will be executed through earned media and social media tools. In appropriate cases, the tobacco control groups will be warned against any specific moves from tobacco industry with call for action to prevent those. It will also organize policy dialogues to share the tobacco industry tactics in violating tobacco control law and hence discuss the need for strong policies for regulating tobacco industry.

 

Tobacco Taxation:

Increasing tobacco prices by imposing tax is one of the effective ways to reduce tobacco consumption, globally. The fact has been recognized by the tobacco companies in their various internal documents as well. Therefore, the Tobacco Companies are always keen to resist effective tax imposition on tobacco in Bangladesh like other countries. They take numbers of explicit and implicit measures to perform this wicked task ignoring about its deadly consequence on our health, environment, and economy as well. The tobacco industry always wants to pretend that they are one of the Largest Tax paying Units (LTU) of the country, and are generating revenue to the country for the development and economic growth every year. With this disguised ‘positive image’ they want to influence the Ministry of Finance in general and the National Board of Revenue (NBR). Only for such causes, implementation of effective tax measure is difficult to take place. Even at times, the government officials fall victim to the ill motives of the industry especially when the industry wants to show the medium brand product to low brand and pay less tax according to the lower brand.

To combat tobacco industry influence on the government agencies for undermining strong tobacco tax measures, the campaign will expose tobacco industries’ ill motives through different traditional and social media outlets. Investigative journalism will be one of the key tools of the campaign. Moreover, earned media and social media will be also used for exposing the tactics of tobacco companies to influence the MPs and other high officials of the government in resisting effective tobacco taxation. ‘Voices of Tobacco Victims’ (VOTV) campaigns will also be undertaken to draw attention of the media and policy makers as a mean of discrediting the tobacco industry including cigarette companies, bidi factories and producers of smokeless tobacco products.