Report Attacks BAT On Marketing Practices

A damning report by an influential British NGO has accused cigarette giant BAT of using methods that are illegal in the UK and the European Union to promote tobacco products in Kenya.

The company is also accused of manipulating local politicians to defeat the enactment of effective tobacco control legislation.

In response to enquiries by The EastAfrican, BAT Kenya last week denied these allegations.

"BAT has fully complied with International Marketing Standards since 2001," the company said in a statement. "BAT Kenya makes no attempt to associate its consumer communication with success, fashion or otherwise."

The report by Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), which has been instrumental in pushing for various smoking bans in public places in Britain, also says that BAT Kenya marketing drives have over the years contributed to Kenya's worsening food security situation by enticing farmers to grow tobacco in place of traditional crops.

There are an estimated 22,000 tobacco farmers in Kenya.

According to the report, BAT has encouraged "farmers to grow tobacco at the expense of food and vital crops, and to spend money on feeding their addiction rather than their families, at a time when four million Kenyans require food aid because of drought, under-production of basic crops and poor distribution."

The report was released to coincide with BAT's annual global general meeting in London on April 27, chaired by company chairman Jan Du Plessis.

The report also came just weeks before Kenyan health officials announce preliminary restrictions on public smoking, expected to be instituted this month.

"Recent examples of BAT advertising, photographed in Kenya in November last year, show that even BAT's discredited self-regulation code is being broken," Ash says in its report. "(The company) has used the absence of tobacco control legislation to use marketing tactics that would be illegal in the UK and many other developed countries."

Such tactics, the report says, include the continued promotion of single-stick cigarettes, which public health experts say encourage access by young people, as well as the use of advertising to associate smoking with "sport and leisure, success friendship and pleasure."

BAT's own marketing standards state that "cigarettes shall not be sold or distributed to consumers in packages containing fewer than 10 sticks". Single stick sales were made illegal in the UK in 1991 under the Children and Young Persons (Protection from Tobacco) Act.

According to the new report, BAT and other tobacco companies have been instrumental in helping block the enactment of an effective tobacco control Act, mostly through lobbying legislators.

Ash notes that Kenya has previously passed a law barring farmers from selling tobacco produce to competing companies, pushing down tobacco producer prices.

In 2004, as BAT and the tobacco lobby battled the tobacco Bill, the report says, BAT hosted MPs at an exclusive beach hotel in Diani to discuss its concerns about the proposed new law.

In its statement, however, BAT firmly denies any wrongdoing.

"BAT Kenya has for the last five years, actively supported the enactment of a balanced and pragmatic tobacco legislation," the company said.

According to the Ministry of Health, smoking prevalence rates among children aged under 15 years now stand at between 13 per cent and 15 cent, while among those aged between 18 and 29 years the rate is estimated to be 45 per cent. Among college and university students the rate is 52 per cent.

The ministry also estimated that while tobacco taxation raised around Ksh5 billion ($70 million) each year, it cost the country five times as much in disease, disability and death. According to the Ash report, other than direct health implications, the growing tobacco epidemic among breadwinners in Kenya is having far-reaching effects on dependants' well-being including in nutrition and education.

"A Nairobi casual worker earning Ksh150 ($2) a day, for example, would only need to smoke eight cigarettes - each costing Ksh3 - daily to go through a fifth of his pay," the Ash report points out. "The same money can buy half a litre of milk from a supermarket, or five eggs - enough protein to pre-empt serious malnutrition in a family of four."