Government plans to stub out tobacco branding

SOUTH Africa was aiming to follow Australia’s lead and put the chill on cigarette companies to use plain packaging for their tobacco products, MPs were told yesterday.

“We will... be testing plain packaging... [which] means there will be no branding on tobacco products,” Department of Health director for health promotion Vimla Moodley said.

Briefing members of the portfolio committee on health about proposed new smoking regulations, Moodley said the department was also testing the use of “pictorials” on tobacco packaging.

These were pictures on cigarette packs of the “health consequences” of smoking.

“Up to now, the regulations allowed for text messages [showing] health warnings, for example ‘tobacco is harmful to your health’. But in terms of international guidelines… we need to introduce pictorials, which are pictures of health consequences, on tobacco products,” she said.

The department was testing pictorials, and the health messages that went with them, in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Reports on these are expected to be completed by December this year.

On the introduction of laws compelling tobacco manufacturers to use plain, non-branded packaging, Moodley noted that this had recently been done in Australia.

“We are keen to test this and if there is... support for it, we will go this route,” she said.

Australia’s plain-packaging laws were fiercely opposed by tobacco companies, but the manufacturers received a setback last month when the country’s highest court endorsed the new regulations, which are set to take effect on December 1.

Speaking after the briefing, Moodley said the new South African regulations, which were still subject to review, could be ready by as early as next year.

The proposed regulations also seek to ban smoking in public places and “certain outdoor places”.

Moodley told MPs that current regulations allowed 25 percent of the floor space in a restaurant or an indoor facility to be designated a smoking area.

With the new regulations “indoor public spaces will now be 100 percent smoke free… Those places will no longer have any space for indoor public tobacco use,” she said.

Other areas the department was seeking to make 100 percent smoke free included “entrances to public spaces, outdoor eating and drinking areas, health facilities, schools, childcare facilities, covered walkways and in stadiums”, she added.

According to a document tabled at the briefing, so-called “smoking prevalence” in South Africa is declining, although about 44 400 deaths in the country each year “are related directly to tobacco”.