Author: Staff Writer

Ireland was the third highest on a list of EU countries for non-duty-paid tobacco (NDP) in 2013, according to a Sunday World story, which did not include the source of its figures.

It came behind Latvia and Lithuania.

But both of the Baltic states have decreased the level of their NDP tobacco sales significantly since 2012, while Ireland’s remains the same, at 28.3 percent.

Ireland has the EU’s second-highest average price for a pack of 20 cigarettes, €9.40, with the U.K. slightly ahead on €9.94.

The U.K. had nevertheless managed to decrease its NDP level from 21.5 percent in 2012 to just 15.6 percent last year.

Taiwan is to introduce less scary graphic images on cigarette pack warnings in the hope of getting smokers at least to look at them, according to a report on Focus Taiwan News Channel.

The country’s Health Promotion Administration (HPA), part of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, is hoping the new warnings, which are due to be introduced on June 1, will be more effective than the current pictures of diseased human organs.

The director of the HPA, Feng Tzung-yi, said the change was being made in the light of evidence that smokers tended not to look at the current warnings because they were too scary.

Currently, cigarette packets in Taiwan carry one of six images of diseased organs, including cancerous lungs and mouths.

The eight new warning images were less direct and included three that were used in the EU, one of them showing a shriveled apple that symbolized the adverse effects of smoking on human skin, said Feng.

The Altria Group said yesterday that its subsidiary Nu Mark had completed the acquisition of the e-vapor business of Green Smoke and its affiliates.

The transaction is valued at about $110 million in cash and up to $20 million in incentive payments.

Additional information is available at www.altria.com.

The World Health Organization said on Friday that China needed a comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising in order to reduce smoking prevalence in the country, according to a Xinhua News Agency story.

What was being planned was not enough.

WHO’s representative in China, Bernhard Schwartlander, made these comments in a statement following a submission by the WHO to the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council, China’s Cabinet.

The office had invited comments from the public on proposed changes to China’s advertising law.

Schwartlander welcomed China’s move to tighten restrictions on tobacco advertising. “Banning all forms of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship is one of the most cost-effective tobacco control measures any government can take,” he said. “Cutting demand for tobacco products has a direct and measurable impact on public health.”

Currently, there are restrictions on tobacco advertising in China, but, while the proposed changes to the advertising law would strengthen those restrictions, advertising would still be allowed in some circumstances.

“This means the proposed amendments do not meet the requirements of the WHO FCTC [Framework Convention on Tobacco Control],” Schwartlander commented.

Alliance One International said yesterday that its Brazilian subsidiary, Alliance One Brasil Exportadora de Tabacos (AOB), and China Tabaco Internacional do Brasil (CTIB), the Brazilian subsidiary of China Tobacco, had formed the joint-venture company China Brasil Tobacos Exportadora (CBT) in Brazil.

Fifty-one percent of the joint venture is owned by CTIB and 49 percent by AOB.

The joint venture’s administrative, buying and processing functions operate out of Alliance One’s facilities in Venancio Aires.

CBT, which has operated as an independent subsidiary of AOB for the past two crops, currently contracts with 9,500 integrated growers.

“We are honored that China Tobacco selected Alliance One for its first international joint venture in the tobacco leaf supply segment,” said Pieter Sikkel, Alliance One’s CEO and president.

“China Tobacco is a highly valued partner, and we are pleased with our combined efforts to grow CBT over the last two crops and see a very bright future.

“China’s cigarette market is the largest in the world, and our joint venture has been established to provide high-quality, sustainably grown Brazilian tobacco to its cigarette manufacturing groups.

“Our partnership aligns Alliance One’s strategy of profitable growth with meeting customers’ unique individual requirements through our sustainable model.”

Philip Morris International yesterday released its second progress report on implementation of the company’s Agricultural Labor Practices program (ALP).

The program aims progressively to eliminate child labor and other labor abuses on the 490,000 farms (the vast majority of which are small-holder farms) where PMI buys tobacco worldwide.

“With our ALP program, we have implemented an operating culture and practices code that allows us to address this complex matter in a determined, systematic and effective manner,” said PMI’s CEO André Calantzopoulos.

“We are mindful that certain behaviors are deeply ingrained in the economic, socio-political and cultural fabric of many tobacco-growing countries and that we cannot be successful alone.

“We combine our own hard work and perseverance with strong engagement with governments and local communities, as well as partnerships with nonprofit organizations specialized in this field and the internationally renowned expert Verité.

“We all know this is a long-term journey but are pleased with the results already achieved.”

The progress report is at http://www.pmi.com/eng/media_center/documents/pmi_progress_report_final_not_watermarked_low_res_0328.pdf.

Imperial Tobacco’s factory in Nantes, France, has been awarded a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certificate for the use of sustainable materials in its product packaging.

The international certificate serves as a guarantee for consumers of responsible forestry management of the base material for cigarette packaging.

To achieve Chain of Custody Certification, the factory had to demonstrate that its packaging suppliers sourced only FSC-approved materials.

“This enables production of FSC labelled products as part of our increased use of renewable materials and eco-friendly packaging,” said Christophe Grard, quality and process manager at Nantes.

Imperial’s other FSC-certified sites are at Radom in Poland and Wilrijk in Belgium, which is a Rizla plant.

Lorillard has elected Jerry W. Levin to its board of directors, effective immediately.

The board is now composed of nine members, eight of whom are non-executive independent directors.

Levin serves as executive chairman of the creative consumer products company, Wilton Brands, a position he has held since 2009. He served as CEO of Wilton Brands from 2009 to 2014.

Levin served as chairman and CEO of JW Levin Partners, a management and investment firm that he founded in 2005.

And prior to that, he served as chairman and interim CEO of Sharper Image Corp., chairman and CEO of American Household and chairman and CEO of Revlon International Corp.

Levin serves also on the boards of directors of US Bancorp and Ecolab.

The designer of a new smoking cessation device is seeking funding through the crowd-funding platform Indiegogo, according to a press note issued through PRNewswire.

Mynus is said to be a “small, sleek-looking device” that “will allow anyone to once and for all wean themselves off of cigarettes, while eliminating virtually all humanly detectable second and third-hand smoke and odor.”

The note said that users placed a cigarette into the device and inserted also one of the Ten Disk System metering disks, which control the amount of smoke and nicotine that is inhaled while smoking.

“The disks allow smokers to adjust their intake anywhere from 100 percent to just 10 percent of the smoke produced by the cigarette,” the press note said.

“Smokers incrementally reduce the amount of smoke and nicotine they inhale by changing discs over time—increasing the ratio of fresh, outside air being mixed with the smoke.

“When they are down to inhaling only 10 percent of a cigarette’s smoke, the next step is quitting altogether.”

There is more information at www.mynus.com.

A tobacco control group has accused tobacco companies of having encouraged scare stories predicting that the introduction of standardized packaging for tobacco products would boost cigarette smuggling, according to a story by Jamie Doward for The Observer (U.K.).

A new study, published in the journal Tobacco Control, claims such arguments must be viewed skeptically.

“We found that from early 2008 until early 2011 there were absolutely no media stories citing industry data on illicit sales of tobacco, despite levels being far higher then than they are now,” said professor Anna Gilmore of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath. “Then suddenly, just after the possibility of plain packaging was announced, we saw an increase in such stories, which have continued since. This, and the fact that leaked documents show that illicit trade was to be one of the industry’s key arguments against plain packs, suggests this is a deliberate strategy.”

There was no attempt in the story to try to explain the seeming conflict between there having been “absolutely no media stories” and there having been an “increase in such stories,” and Gilmore went on to say that industry claims that the use of illicit cigarettes in the U.K. was sharply increasing were “wholly inconsistent” with historical trends and recent independent data.

The study apparently also states that there was growing evidence tobacco companies were still involved in the illicit trade. “There is evidence of significant overproduction of cigarettes in markets such as Ukraine and Belarus and we know these excess cigarettes end up in the illegal market,” the study said.

The full story is at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/30/tobacco-cigarette-smuggling-scare-plain-packs.