Make tobacco firms pay for health, environmental harms, anti-smoking groups tell govt

Janet Ogundepo

Governments across Africa, Asia and Latin America have been urged to hold tobacco companies financially accountable for the health, economic and environmental damage caused by their products, as global tobacco control advocates launched a week-long campaign demanding stronger enforcement of industry liability laws.

The call was made on Monday during the launch of the “Make Big Tobacco Pay” Global Week of Action, a campaign bringing together public health advocates, legal experts and civil society organisations from several countries to push for the implementation of Article 19 of the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which deals with liability and compensation for tobacco-related harms.

The Global Week of Action, which runs through June 5, coincides with World Environment Day and will feature webinars, media engagements, legal actions, public petitions and advocacy campaigns aimed at pressing governments to adopt stronger measures to hold tobacco companies accountable for the harms associated with their products.

Participants at the media briefing argued that while governments and communities continue to bear the costs of tobacco-related diseases, environmental pollution and healthcare expenditures, tobacco companies continue to make enormous profits.

They maintained that the “polluter pays” principle, widely used in environmental protection, should also be applied to the tobacco industry to ensure that companies bear the costs of the damage they cause rather than governments and taxpayers.

Speaking at the event, the Executive Director of Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa, Akinbode Oluwafemi, said accountability for tobacco companies extends beyond legal sanctions and should include taking responsibility for the health, economic, social and environmental harms linked to their operations.

“Yes, there is the issue of legal accountability. And again, the issue of shifting the costs of their business model back to them. They should take full responsibility for the health, economic, social, and environmental harms that they cause,” he said.

Oluwafemi recalled that the Nigerian government instituted a landmark lawsuit against major tobacco firms in 2007 over allegations that they concealed the health risks associated with tobacco use.

“The Nigerian government in 2007 took tobacco companies, British American Tobacco, Philip Morris International, ITC, to court in a very landmark suit in Nigeria because of their deception and the fact that they concealed the risks of what is associated with their products.

“Of course, several years down the road, we’re still in court. A lot of people don’t really know that this case has not gone to trial until today,” he said.

He noted that part of the lawsuit seeks the recovery of public costs incurred from tobacco-related harms and measures to prevent future misconduct by the industry.

The CAPPA ED also referenced the 2024 sanctions imposed by Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission on British American Tobacco, describing it as a significant step toward corporate accountability.

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“And for us, this is a very significant development, because it actually created a precedent of using administrative processes to be able to bring corporations, not only tobacco companies, to account for violating laws because of the kind of businesses that they do,” he stated.

In Mexico, representatives of civil society organisations raised concerns over what they described as growing tobacco industry interference and the increasing popularity of emerging nicotine products.

Speaking on behalf of Salud Justa MX, Eric Antonio Ochoa said tobacco companies were increasingly relying on novel nicotine products to sustain profits.

“Philip Morris International reports that in 2025, 41.5 per cent of the global revenue will come from emerging products and nicotine products,” he noted.

Ochoa disclosed that advocacy groups would this week initiate legal and administrative actions against companies marketing nicotine products without adequate consumer information.

“We will file at least three complaints with the Consumer Rights Protection Agency and the Health Risk Protection Agency to prevent products from being advertised and sold without information to consumers,” he said.

From the United States, Senior Staff Attorney at the Public Health Law Center, Willow Nadjar-Anderson, said litigation remains a powerful tool for exposing industry practices and ensuring accountability.

“The problem of tobacco product waste is not a misunderstanding that can be cleaned up with an education campaign. This is a real fight.

“If we only clean downstream, the industry gets profit and the communities get all the pollution, cleanup costs, and health harms. This is not an accident. This is a business model, one that privatises the profits and socialises the harm,” she said.

Also speaking, the Executive Director of Vision for Accelerated Sustainable Development in Ghana, Labram Musah, lamented that low- and middle-income countries continue to bear a disproportionate burden of tobacco-related deaths.

“When it comes to the issue of data, many times, some of us are very derailed and devastated on the way the data is skewed to low- and middle-income countries, where we have 8 million deaths annually,” he said.

Musah called on governments to implement Article 19 of the WHO tobacco control treaty and channel tobacco tax revenues toward prevention and treatment programmes.

In the Philippines, representatives of HealthJustice accused tobacco companies of exploiting digital platforms and social media influencers to market tobacco and nicotine products to young people despite existing advertising restrictions.

Ralph Degollacion of HealthJustice said recent monitoring had uncovered widespread online promotion of tobacco and vaping products through celebrities and influencers.

“Our recent monitoring in the past two, three years, we have documented the continued use of celebrities, social media influencers, public figures, and online platforms to promote tobacco and nicotine products,” he said.

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He disclosed that tobacco control advocates had filed multiple complaints against tobacco companies, leading to regulatory action against some promotional campaigns.

“The first complaint that we filed last year resulted in a victory, wherein our regulatory ministry ordered Philip Morris to cease the advertisement of one of their products using a celebrity,” he said.

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