The French government could be set to ban the use of electronic cigarettes in public places and the workplace, according to a story in The Local Europe.
Sales of electronic cigarettes are said to be booming in France and the country’s Health Minister, Marisol Touraine, was expected yesterday to be handed a report that puts these devices largely in a positive light.
The report is based on a study commissioned in March and carried out by the pulmonologist, Professor Bertrand Dautzenberg.
The Local said that a radio RTL story had predicted that Touraine was nevertheless going to announce a ban.
At present, employers have discretion as to whether or not to allow the use of electronic cigarettes by employees.
A ban is likely to do serious damage to the electronic cigarette industry. One supplier made the point that 20 per cent of its business was tied up in selling disposable products to restaurants, clubs, bars and hotels.
The Local said that about half a million French people were estimated to be using electronic cigarettes as a way of weaning themselves off traditional cigarettes.
The Andhra Pradesh Flue-cured Virginia Tobacco Growers’ Association has decried an Indian government proposal to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in the domestic tobacco industry, according to a story in the latest issue of the BBM Bommidala Group newsletter.
The association believes that such a move would undermine the domestic industry.
In a petition to the Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry, Anand Sharma, the association said that FDI would pave the way for the free entry of multinational companies, which would adversely impact the livelihood of millions of growers.
It warned of a loss to the exchequer of Rs56.60 billion during the next three to four years.
The incidence of smoking in Israel dropped by 2.9 percentage points in one year: between 2010-2011 and 2011-12, according to a story by Dan Even for Haaretz.
This figure is based upon surveys conducted by the Health Ministry’s Center for Disease Control, which is required to submit an annual report on the state of smoking in the country.
In 2011-12, a survey conducted among 2,964 Israelis aged 21 years and older indicated that 17.7 per cent of the adult population smoked cigarettes.
Among Jewish men, the figure was 20.9 per cent; among Jewish women, 12.0 per cent; among Arab men, 41.4 per cent; and among Arab women, 8.1 per cent.
The 2010-11 survey found that 20.6 per cent of the adult population comprised smokers.
It found, too, that, overall, 27.2 per cent of men and 14.5 per cent of women were smokers; while 19.8 per cent of Jews and 24.9 per cent of Arabs were smokers.
The report showed also that last year Israelis consumed 415 million packs of cigarettes, down 2.6 per cent from the 426 million packs consumed during 2011.
More than 56 per cent of Romanian smokers are planning to quit their habit in the coming year, according to a story by Irina Popescu for the Romanian Insider, quoting a study conducted under the European Commission’s campaign, Ex-smokers Are Unstoppable.
The study showed that 80 per cent of Romania’s smokers believe willpower would be the main factor in getting them to quit, while 43 per cent agreed that motivational techniques could help them to stop smoking.
About 28 per cent of Romanian smokers find it difficult to resist the impulse to light up when drinking tea or coffee and 27 per cent find it difficult to socialize with other smokers if they are trying to quit.
However, 42 per cent of the approximately 1,000 Romanian respondents said they would feel proud if they succeeded in stopping smoking, while another 42 per cent considered they would feel healthier and pay more attention to their health if they quit.
Most of the smokers who responded to the survey said they smoked between 70 and 140 cigarettes weekly.
As well as providing green energy to the mill and local community, the new biomass plant is marked out as Cumbria’s tallest building.
Iggesund Paperboard’s new biomass plant at Workington, England, was yesterday inaugurated in the presence of the board of directors of the Holmen Group, the forest industry group to which Iggesund Paperboard belongs.
When the CHP (combined heat and power) plant came online in March, the company’s paperboard mill at Workington switched its energy source from fossil natural gas to biomass, thereby reducing its annual fossil carbon emissions by the equivalent of the emissions of more than 58,000 cars, each driven 20,000 kilometres per year.
As well as now being self-sufficient in electricity and heat, the mill will also be able to supply both green electricity and heat to local residents.
With its 400 employees, Iggesund Paperboard’s Workington facility is the UK’s only producer of folding box board.
Incada, the paperboard made at the mill, is constructed of a central layer made of mechanical pulp that is produced on site and that gives a low weight combined with high stiffness, with outer layers made of purchased chemical pulp to create high whiteness and good printability.
“For more than a decade now Iggesund Paperboard has invested to raise the standard of what was originally a very ordinary paperboard mill to one that is state of the art,” said Ola Schultz-Eklund, the mill’s managing director. “Including the £108 million spent on the CHP plant, we have invested more than £200 million in this transformation.”
Iggesund Paperboard said in a press note that, step by step the investments and renovations had raised both the quality and quality consistency of Incada, and, as a result, the mill had found new end uses for its products and gradually improved its profitability.
“In our investment in this new biomass CHP plant, profitability and reduced climate impact go hand in hand,” Schultz-Eklund said. “We know that the cost of fossil-based energy will increase faster than that of biomass, so we regard this investment as a way to stabilise our energy costs.
“At the same time our emissions of fossil carbon dioxide from the production process have now fallen to almost zero, which should reasonably make us an even more interesting option for the large end users, who have more or less promised consumers that they will both declare and reduce the emissions created by the products they sell.”
Among other things, Incada is used for packaging, and, the press note said, paperboard packaging was a competitive method of protecting goods throughout the distribution chain, from producer to consumer.
“We base our production on a renewable raw material that can later be recycled either in material or energy form,” Schultz-Eklund said. “Our manufacturing process meets high environmental standards and our paperboard is an excellent fit in a society which is increasingly moving towards greater sustainability.”
Ireland may become the second country to require standardized packaging for cigarettes, reports the Kildare Nationalist.
Health Minister James Reilly announced government approval for his controversial plans, which he hopes to have enacted early next year. Plain packaging made its global debut late last year in Australia.
An Irish retail group cautioned the move would help criminals and fuel cigarette smuggling. Retailers Against Smuggling accused the minister of “not giving a damn” about independent retailers. Tobacco companies claimed plain packaging would do more harm to the economy by making smuggling easier rather than stopping children from taking up the habit.
Reilly said while many arguments will be made against the move, he is confident the legislation will be justified and supported purely by the fact that it will save lives.
Ireland has been at the forefront of tobacco control. It was the world’s first country to enforce a workplace smoking ban, which included pubs and restaurants, in March 2004, and the first EU country to remove all tobacco advertising from retail outlets.
Bulgaria has formally backed Greece in its opposition to some of the revisions proposed by the EU Commission at the end of last year to the Tobacco Products Directive, according to a Bulgarian News Agency story quoting a press note issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
Both countries produce leaf tobacco – mainly oriental tobacco, which is a small but key element in many American-blend cigarettes.
Bulgaria and Greece are concerned largely with the proposed revisions that would tend to standardize tobacco products and their packaging.
The Commission has proposed packaging regulations that, while not quite along the lines of Australia’s ‘plain packaging’ are certainly tending in that direction. It has called for the prohibition of flavourings and the banning of certain categories of products, including slim cigarettes.
The Agency story said that these measures would have a ‘disastrous impact on employment in tobacco production’.
In Bulgaria, more than 200,000 people worked in the tobacco production sector, more than in any other EU member state, the press note said.
A declaration by Greece, supported by Bulgaria, Spain, Poland, the CzechRepublic, Hungary, Cyprus, Italy, Romania and Croatia, argued that the proposed new rules put forward by the Commission would seriously affect the livelihood of more than 500,000 EU citizens employed in tobacco growing and processing.
The Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) undertaken by the European Commission on its proposed revisions to the 2001 Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) is not sufficiently robust when reviewed from the perspective of regulatory best practice, including the Commission’s own guidelines for RIA’s, according to Oxera, an economics consultancy, in a report commissioned by Japan Tobacco International (JTI).
“The aim of Oxera’s review was not to question the objectives behind the proposals; we support sound tobacco regulation,” said Dr. Gunnar Niels, director at Oxera. “However, from the perspective of best practice in public policy, regulation and economic analysis, we concluded that the RIA is not sufficiently robust and contains a number of significant shortcomings. This is not to say that there is no underlying economic case for some of the proposed regulations, or other forms of tobacco regulation. However, a more robust RIA would benefit regulatory decision-making in this area”, he added.
According to a note posted on JTI’s website, Oxera highlighted four key shortcomings; the first of which concerned a lack of clarity in respect of the objectives. ‘While the overall objective of the TPD revision is said to improve the functioning of the internal market, a number of aspects of the proposed regulations seem to go against criteria that are normally considered to be part of a well-functioning market, including innovation, competition, consumer choice and cross-border trade. In fact, most elements of the RIA seem to be driven primarily by public health considerations, identified as an additional objective, rather than the internal market.’
The baseline scenario was said not to be clearly defined and not to be based on available evidence. ‘The RIA assumes without any supporting evidence that the current trend towards decreasing tobacco consumption will stop if regulations remain unchanged, and that any further reduction in consumption would be attributed to the proposed regulations rather than existing regulations or other factors.’
There was a reliance on assumptions rather than evidence. ‘The RIA assumes that the TPD would result in a 2% reduction in tobacco consumption within five years of the proposed regulation changes. The 2% reduction in tobacco consumption is assumed rather than derived from evidence or from analysis. In addition, the cost-benefit analysis has been applied solely to the final proposed package of measures, rather than to the individual areas separately. This goes against the Commission’s own guidelines.’
And there was a limited reference to evidence or analysis in the RIA to support the proposals. ‘There is limited reference to evidence in the RIA to support the proposals on packaging; ingredients and other tobacco products; and track and trace.’
“This report further demonstrates that the proposal to revise the EU TPD has not been properly thought through, said Thierry Lebeaux, head of EU Affairs at JTI.
“In the interest of quality regulation, we hope that Oxera’s conclusions will be taken into consideration before any new measures are voted on,” he concluded.
Forty MPs have urged the government of Bangladesh to increase by 70 per cent the taxes on bidis, cigarettes and jarda (smokeless tobacco), according to a story in The Financial Express.
The MPs, who wanted to see the increase included in the 2013-14 Budget, were trying to thwart the efforts of about 170 MPs who were said to be seeking to protect the bidi industry.
A senior National Board of Revenue official was quoted as saying that the government had not increased taxes on bidis for three years because of the lobbying by the lawmakers.
The French National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA) has developed several plant protection applications for smartphones and tablets to help farmers identify and localize diseases on plants in the field.
In order to reduce the use of pesticides on crops, the early and reliable identification of a disease and the detection of emergent pests have proven to be crucial stages in plant protection. In particular, such information enables an alignment of the diagnosis with the most appropriate protection methods.
An INRA team based in Bordeaux and led by Dominique Blancard and Jean-Marc Armand, has developed several applications, but Di@gnoPlant® Tobacco is the first by INRA to be translated into English for international use. The translation was done by CORESTA (Cooperation Centre for Scientific Research Relative to Tobacco).
The Di@gnoPlant® Tobacco application answers two key questions in respect of tobacco plant protection. Firstly, what disease causes the symptoms? And secondly, what control methods can be used?
At the onset of disease symptoms on a crop, a farmer or field technician using Di@gnoPlant is able to identify diseases on a crop using an image identification module.
It is then possible to obtain information on the characteristics of these diseases, based on an INRA database organised into fact sheets that detail the symptoms and biology of the incriminated pest.
And finally, the farmer or field technician can implement optimised protection methods.
‘When developing this project, the scientists had two aims: to build a continuum of diagnostic/advice tools already accessible over the internet thanks to the e-Phytia® website (English version pertaining to tobacco will soon be on line) and make it available in the field using the new information and communication opportunities provided by smartphones and tablets (App store and Google play),’ CORESTA said in a press note.
‘A complementary application, Vigipl@nt, will be developed in the future for “geolocalisation”.’
CORESTA said that it and INRA would continue to collaborate. ‘Thanks to its worldwide networks and links with numerous organisations and universities, CORESTA will regularly supplement and improve the database on tobacco and hopes this application can assist tobacco farmers all over the world,’ it said.
