UN: Tobacco industry endangers nature, hampers economic progress

GENEVA: Smoking not only blackens lungs but also threatens the global environment and economic development, the World Health Organization ( WHO) said in reports published on Tuesday.

In the report, which comes one day before World No Tobacco Day, the UN health agency said that tobacco farming and drying, as well as cigarette manufacturing and smoking kill forests and damage the atmosphere.

The WHO is trying to widen the tobacco debate from individual health to showing how it is a global problem, according to WHO assistant director general Oleg Chestnov said.

“From start to finish, the tobacco life cycle is an overwhelmingly polluting and damaging process,” he writes in the report.

Tobacco plants require more fertilisers and harmful pest control chemicals than other types of crops.

Forests have disappeared not only to grow tobacco, but also to harvest firewood for drying the tobacco leaves.

An estimated 11.4 million metric tonnes of wood are used each year for this drying process, known as curing — or one tree for 300 cigarettes.

In China, the world’s biggest tobacco grower, this crop is responsible for 18 per cent of annual deforestation.

Cigarette factories produce half a million tonnes of waste contaminated with nicotine and other chemicals each year, the WHO said.

Manufacturing is “extremely waterintensive,” the UN agency added.

The WHO said international cigarette companies have often reacted to criticism about environmental problems by moving to another country.

They “simply uproot their operations and ignore the long-term environmental damage that they have caused, and take them to a new location where they can repeat the environmental damage,” the WHO wrote.

The UN agency pointed out that tobacco growers tend to be poorer than other farmers because tobacco is very labour-intensive, and because it is more damaging to health than other crops.

Smoking also runs counter to development efforts because in many of the world’s poorest households, more than 10 per cent of the income is spent on cigarettes rather than food or education.

When cigarettes are lit up, they cause further pollution.

More than 6 trillion cigarettes are smoked each year, releasing between 3 million and 5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the air, as well as thousands of tonnes of carcinogenic chemicals,according to the WHO.

In addition, lingering nicotine can react with existing air pollutants to form new chemical compounds that cause cancer.

Two-thirds of all cigarette stubs do not end up in garbage bins but on the ground.

The WHO cited studies showing that heavy metals, fertilisers and pesticides are leached from stubs into the environment.