The World Health Organization, which is the United Nations’ health policy arm, will meet in India next month to discuss a plan that would give the organization the technical means to monitor the movement of tobacco products around the world.
The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was created to consider policies aimed at reducing tobacco use and reducing the flow of black market tobacco across the world’s borders.
In November, its members will meet to discuss a proposal from Kenya and Burkina Faso that would impose a new system of tracking tobacco products around the world, for the purpose of fighting the illegal tobacco trade.
According to a copy of the agenda for this month’s regional tobacco meeting that was obtained by the Washington Examiner, the two African countries are pushing for the anti-tobacco group to oppose any track and trace program for tobacco that is “under the influence, designed, facilitated or owned by the Tobacco Industry.”
Such a plan, if implemented and enforced, would require tobacco companies in any country that ratifies the proposal to submit to WHO-approved technology that would track their products around the world.
The aim of that system would be to help the UN reduce the diversion of legal tobacco shipments into the black market. But that system would effectively supercede the control systems that individual companies now have in place, and would give the WHO unprecedented access into how tobacco products flow around the world.
The U.S. is not a party to convention, but any advancement of the plan is likely to be met with opposition from companies and other groups that don’t want to turn over supply chain data to the WHO’s anti-tobacco group.
The WHO “has zero experience in combating organized crime,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Dr. Roger Bate wrote last month. According to Bate, governments, security experts and private industry must be allowed to effectively cooperate in order to reduce illegal tobacco.
The plan is also likely to raise complaints about why Kenya proposed it. Trafficking in illegal tobacco products is reportedly rampant in Kenya and in Africa more broadly.
The African militant jihadist organization Al-Mourabitoun is led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, nick-named “Mr. Marlboro” because of his organization’s dependence on the sale of illegal tobacco to fund terrorist attacks on Westerners in Burkina Faso and neighboring countries.
The WHO nonetheless congratulated both Kenya and Burkina Faso for their efforts to stamp out illegal tobacco trade, and called on other countries to take similar steps.
Kenya’s political leaders are also mired in a scandal involving possible bribes paid by a Swiss company to win a contract that would let the company impose its own traceability systems for certain products in the country. Some suspect Kenya’s proposal at the WHO is designed to further benefit that company, SICPA.
A report from the Taxpayers Protection Alliance released this month said the WHO’s anti-tobacco body has routinely pushed proposals that have led to “grave concerns over global governance and national sovereignty.”
The group has also routinely banned members of the press from its meetings, and has taken up controversial positions, as has the broader organization. In June, for example, the WHO told Syrians, thousands of whom have been killed or forced to flee in the face of a five-year civil war, that they should stop smoking because it is dangerous to their health, “notwithstanding the current crisis in the country.”
