Tobacco standard still needed to effectively address its impact

Tobacco standard still needed to effectively address its impact – Health Minister

Dec 17, 2010 News

Although a regional standard has been drafted by Caribbean countries, including Guyana, for the compulsory labelling of tobacco packages to emphasise the danger of the product, there yet remains a challenge to implement this measure.
This is according to Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, who asserted that even today, tobacco remains a major killer around the world. He revealed that for more than five years now Guyana and the Caribbean countries have been working together on creating a tobacco standard through the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ), which is headquartered in Barbados.
And one of the obligations, he said, is that a single standard for labelling of tobacco products be designed, a move which is required under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which is the only health treaty that has ever been signed by Caribbean countries.
“To this day we have been unable to get agreements between countries to support a regional standard for the labelling of tobacco products. It is bad enough that we have failed as countries to curtail smoking, and indeed, the evidence in the Caribbean is that smoking among young people is increasing.”
This development, the Minister emphasised, is in direct contradiction to what occurs in developed countries where the evidence is that the initiation of smoking is going down. “We have the exact opposite result; it is increasing,” Minister Ramsammy opined.
It was in September 2007 that the respective Governments met and under the Port of Spain declaration, recognised that chronic diseases represent a major developmental challenge. And according to Minister Ramsammy, it is one of the few health issues that drove the governments of the Caribbean to have a heads of Government meeting to discuss the non-chronic communicable diseases crisis.
“At that meeting and in the Port of Spain declaration, we identified tobacco as a major risk factor and a major contributor to the growing emergency of the chronic non-communicable diseases.”
As a result, one of the decisions taken is that countries must insist on the labelling of tobacco products so that consumers will know the risk that they are taking. Included in this decision, Dr Ramsammy pointed out, is that the labelling should entail pictorial demonstrations of the danger.
“Yet with this as our backdrop we have failed to come to agreements on labelling of these products. Some of us want to do more studies on what the impact of these labels would be, and the truth of the matter is it doesn’t matter what the study comes up with; we have an obligation under the FTCT to have those labels…I am at a loss as to why in the Caribbean we cannot arrive at some consensus around what this labelling should be.”
Dr. Ramsammy noted that the controversy surrounding the state of affairs right now is not whether there should be pictorial labels, but rather what should be the size. The standards, he revealed, calls for a 50 percent surface coverage on each side of the package. However, it is assumed by some that the Caribbean cannot embrace such a move at this time, the Minister lamented.
“I am not naming any country, but there are at least four countries that have not yet been able to give a go-ahead….”
For this reason, the Minister said that he plans to urge the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) – the Caribbean Regional Body which is tasked with giving the final request for CROSQ – to fully implement the required regional standards for tobacco products. And according to Minister Ramsammy, unless the Caribbean is able to put in place regional standards, it will in fact have to embrace and make use of national standards instead.

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Tobacco standard still needed to effectively address its impact – Health Minister

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