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Tag: France

  • SOVAPE Ceases Operations

    SOVAPE Ceases Operations

    The French consumer vaping organization SOVAPE will cease operations, reports Vaping360.

    Best known for organizing three Vape Summits in France between 2016 and 2019, SOVAPE also co-founded the European Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates umbrella organization. Since 2019, the group has commissioned annual surveys of French public opinion on vaping and nicotine conducted by major market research firm BVA.

    However, this year, BVA notified SOVAPE that it could no longer participate due to a health industry client’s contract prohibiting BVA from also working with nicotine-associated organizations. During its existence, SOVAPE also faced criticism of connections to the tobacco industry.

    In an Oct. 6 website post, SOVAPE explained that it can no longer carry out its mission due to the current climate of “censorship, threats, lies, denigration and slander, to which can be added the dissemination of fake news and the denial of scientific data.”

    “Dialogue in this context is impossible,” SOVAPE wrote, “and clearly, it is now even ‘forbidden’ to provide information, such as a banal survey, on reducing the risks of smoking in France.”

    SOVAPE will donate the balance of its funds equally to the Pasteur Institute and fellow vaping groups AIDUCE and La Vape du Coeur. SOVAPE will keep its website available for 10 years and maintains videos of Vape Summit proceedings on its YouTube channel.

    “We regret that we are no longer able to cultivate a dialogue to promote the risk reduction approach against the main cause of preventable diseases and premature deaths in France,” SOVAPE said in its post. “We do not regret having tried but must acknowledge that it is no longer possible for us to lead this fight that is dear to us and which has nevertheless contributed to saving lives!”

  • French Vape Organization SOVAPE to Shutter Doors

    French Vape Organization SOVAPE to Shutter Doors

    French consumer vaping organization SOVAPE announced this week it will dissolve. The group has been active since 2016.

    Best known for organizing three Vape Summits in France between 2016 and 2019, SOVAPE also co-founded the European Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (ETHRA) umbrella organization. Since 2019, the group has commissioned annual surveys of French public opinion on vaping and nicotine conducted by major market research firm BVA.

    However, this year BVA notified SOVAPE that it could no longer participate due to a health industry client’s contract prohibiting BVA from also working with nicotine-associated organizations, according to media reports.  

    The abrupt cancellation of the survey followed other recent blows, including news articles accusing SOVAPE and other consumer groups of connections to the tobacco industry, and attacks on scientists and health professionals who supported SOVAPE’s mission.

    In an Oct. 6 website post, SOVAPE explained it can no longer carry out its mission due to the current climate of “censorship, threats, lies, denigration and slander, to which can be added the dissemination of fake news and the denial of scientific data.”

    “Dialogue in this context is impossible,” SOVAPE wrote, “and clearly, it is now even ‘forbidden’ to provide information, such as a banal survey, on reducing the risks of smoking in France.”

    SOVAPE will donate the balance of its funds equally to the Pasteur Institute and fellow vaping groups AIDUCE and La Vape du Cœur. SOVAPE has paid to keep its website available for 10 years, and maintains videos of Vape Summit proceedings on its Youtube channel.

    “We regret that we are no longer able to cultivate a dialogue to promote the risk reduction approach against the main cause of preventable diseases and premature deaths in France,” SOVAPE said in its post. “We do not regret having tried, but must acknowledge that it is no longer possible for us to lead this fight that is dear to us, and which has nevertheless contributed to saving lives!”

  • Europe OKs French Ban on Disposables

    Europe OKs French Ban on Disposables

    Photo: justoomm

    The European Commission on Sept. 25 approved France’s bid to ban disposable vapes, reports the Connexion.

    France started the process of banning single-use e-cigarettes in December 2023, citing concerns about youth uptake and environmental pollution. Disposable vapes contain microplastics and chemical substances and are generally powered by nonrechargeable, nonrecyclable lithium batteries.

    The National Assembly’s proposed ban gained approval in the French Senate in February 2024.

    Europe’s validation was the final step in making the ban possible.

    “This is a great victory for the environment and for the health of our children, who are the main targets of these marketing campaigns,” Francesca Pasquini, co-writer of the bill, was quoted as saying.

    Lawmakers have yet to determine when the legislation will take force. The next step is for senators to vote definitively on a ban before it is formally put into effect.

    France will be joining Belgium, where the sale of disposable vapes will be illegal from Jan. 1, 2025.

    According to an investigation by the French anti-smoking federation ACT, 15 percent of teenagers aged between 13 and 16 have used e-cigarettes.

  • French Tobacconists Oppose Price Hike

    French Tobacconists Oppose Price Hike

    Photo: OceanProd

    French tobacconists have objected to a proposal to raise cigarette prices to €25 per pack by 2040, reports Euractiv.

    Cigarettes in France currently retail for around €12.50 per pack, one of the highest rates in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Europe, only U.K. and Irish smokers shell out more for their cigarettes.

    Despite the high price, France remains one of the countries with the highest number of daily smokers, and every year tobacco causes 70,000 premature deaths.

    To address this issue, the Senate Social Affairs Committee in a recent report suggested doubling the price over the next 16 years.

    Noting that “the policy of reducing smoking has failed,” the committee recommended increasing the price by at least 3.25 percent every year between now and 2040. According to the Senate, the prevalence of smoking decreases when the price increases by more than 4 percent.

    The Confédération des buralistes, which represents the interests of tobacconists in France, condemned the proposal, arguing that French already leads the way in terms of tobacco taxation. The group said the report disregards the consequences of price, both on the country’s public health and on the network’s economic situation.

    For tobacconists, efforts should focus on the fight against the black market, which account for between 30 percent and 40 percent of cigarettes consumed in France.

    However, this figure is disputed by anti-tobacco association ACT, the directorates of public finances and customs, Observatoire français des drogues et des tendances addictives, who put the figure at around 6 percent.

    France’s 2023-2027 National Tobacco Control Plan, presented in November by former health minister Aurélien Rousseau, currently plans a price of €13 per pack by 2026.

    The EU is likely to review tobacco taxation following the EU elections in June, as the current Commission has not reviewed the 2014 Tobacco Products Directive and the 2011 Tobacco Taxation Directive, as originally planned.

  • French Continuing to Finance Tobacco: Report

    French Continuing to Finance Tobacco: Report

    Image: sergnester

    Several French banks continue to finance the tobacco industry despite promises to stop doing so, according to a report commissioned by anti-smoking group Alliance Contre le Tabac (ACT), reports RFI. In November 2023 alone, the country’s banks invested $733 million in the tobacco business. Of these investment funds, 40 percent came from the BPCE Group and more than 20 percent came from Credit Agricole.

    “If the tobacco industry has succeeded in maintaining its deadly trade, it is, in part, thanks to the resources provided by banking institutions and investment funds,” said Marion Catellin, director of the ACT.

    The banks pledged to stop funding tobacco companies six years ago, according to Catellin.

    Australian nongovernmental organization Tobacco-Free Portfolio introduced the Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge in 2017, which called on international financial players to stop financing tobacco companies. Societe Generale, Credit Agricole and the BPCE group signed this pledge.

    The ACT-commissioned report showed that these banks, between 2018 and 2023, approved loans amounting to $5.3 billion to BAT, Philip Morris International and Imperial Brands.

    “These bank credits are unacceptable,” said Catellin. “As World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently stated, every investment in the tobacco industry is an investment in death and disease. By financing the tobacco industry, French banks are complicit in an industry that kills one out of every two consumers.”

    “Aware of the environmental and social impacts associated with the tobacco sector, Societe Generale has committed to a strategy to exit the sector,” said the bank, which accounts for 83 percent of French financial support for the tobacco industry. Societe Generale signed a charter in September 2023 expressing plans to exit the sector.

  • French Vote Paves Way to Disposable Ban

    French Vote Paves Way to Disposable Ban

    Credit: Laurence Soulez

    France has moved one step closer to a ban on disposable vapes. The Senate voted unanimously Wednesday to ban pre-filled, disposable e-cigarettes.

    “The marketing of these products is intended to attract young people with colors, fruit [flavors] and aromas, and low price,” Labour and Health Minister Catherine Vautrin told the chamber.

    While the Senators approved the law, they modified the National Assembly’s text to clarify the ban, according to media reports.

    The text would ban the “manufacturing, marketing, sale, distribution or offering for free” of the products and prohibit owning them with the intent to sell or distribute them, with a fine of up to €100,000 ($108,000).

    The two chambers will now need to combine their text and approve that version before it is sent to the European Commission, which will have six months to hand down an opinion.

    The government has said it hopes the ban will come into effect in September.

    Meanwhile, vaping and other recent smoking innovations are expected to be high on the agenda as country representatives gather in Panama City on Monday, tasked with revising the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first treaty ever adopted under the auspices of WHO, entered into force.

  • France Unveils Plans to Curb Smoking

    France Unveils Plans to Curb Smoking

    Photo: Richard-Villalon

    France will increase tobacco taxes, ban disposable vapes and further restrict outdoor smoking as part of an ambitious plan to reduce the health impact of tobacco consumption and create a “tobacco-free” generation by 2032, a term that is usually defined as a situation in which less than 5 percent of the population smokes.

    Smoking rates in France have remained roughly unchanged since 2019 after decades of regularly declining, according to French public health authorities. Nearly a quarter of French adults, or about 12 million people, still smoke daily. Smoking is the leading cause of avoidable mortality in France, causing about 75,000 deaths per year.

    Some 15 percent of teenagers have vaped, and 47 percent of them started their nicotine consumption through e-cigarettes, according to an ACT Alliance Contre Le Tabac survey published in November.

    The government plan bans smoking on beaches, near public buildings like schools and in public parks and forests next year. Previously, local authorities had already barred people from smoking at more than 7,000 outdoor locations, including at beaches, forests and parks across the country, but there was no nationwide ban.

    The government also wants to extend the plain packaging requirement for cigarette packs to vaping products and set a minimum tobacco price of €13 ($14) per pack.

    Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau said the government will enact most measures by degree early next year. The ban on disposable vapes, however, will require legislation that is expected to go to Parliament in December.

    While welcoming France’s ambition to end smoking, tobacco harm reduction activists expressed concern about the planned ban on single-use vapes, which they described as a step backward in the fight against smoking.

    “Such prohibitions only serve to drive consumers either back to smoking or to black markets,” said Michael Landl, director of the World Vapers Alliance, in a statement.

    “We’ve seen time and again that prohibition doesn’t work. France should look to countries like Sweden, where a balanced approach to harm reduction has led to significant public health gains. The French government must recognize the importance of offering a variety of less harmful alternatives to smokers.”

  • A Taste of ‘Terroir’

    A Taste of ‘Terroir’

    Photos: CTS
    Photos: CTS

    With its origin-focused approach, CTS has become a successful niche player in the French RYO category.

    By Stefanie Rossel

    “Shrinking” is the first word that comes to mind when thinking about the French tobacco sector. According to Statista, French tobacco sales are expected to decline by almost 1 percent annually between 2023 and 2028. In 2022, the tobacco market in France experienced its strongest value decline in a decade.

    With the country’s last cigarette factory in Corsica closing this December, cigarette manufacture in France will come to an end. Due to the phaseout of EU tobacco subsidies in 2006, the area dedicated to tobacco cultivation in France has decreased as well—from 3,149 ha in 2016 to 1,205 ha in 2021.

    Sadly, the only part of the tobacco landscape that continues to flourish is the illicit cigarette trade. According to a KPMG study commissioned by Philip Morris International, illegal smokes represented 32 percent of the French tobacco market in 2022.

    However, this dark environment conceals some remarkable success stories.

    One of them has been written by Collaboration Traditab Santele (CTS), an alliance of Traditab, a company run by small tobacco producers in southwestern France, and Santele, a Flemish family-owned manufacturer of traditional Belgian rolling tobacco.

    Considering the pressures from increasing regulation, the two companies felt it made sense to join forces. Traditab provided the raw materials and tobacco cultivation knowledge; Santele contributed roll-your-own expertise and manufacturing facilities.

    Established in 2016, CTS today is a medium-sized enterprise headquartered in Belgium with offices in France and Spain that currently manufactures and markets four brands of RYO tobaccos, focusing on the concept of “terroir.” The French term is used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop’s phenotype, including unique environmental contexts, farming practices and growth habitat.

    CTS’ Vasconha RYO brand, an American-blend type, is made of 100 percent tobacco cultivated by farmers in Gascony, the Basque Country and Aragon, traditional tobacco cultivating regions on both sides of the Pyrenees. Wervikse Tabak b34, a fine-cut dark blend, comes from Wervik, a historical tobacco-growing region in Flanders. The tobacco for Veramia, a Virginia blend, is cultivated exclusively in the western Spanish region of Extremadura, where tobacco has been grown since the 16th century.

    Focus on Origin

    The company’s bestseller is 1637. In October 2023, the product was the third-bestselling RYO brand in France. Made of French tobaccos grown in the southwest, its name alludes to the year when tobacco was first planted in the region. The brand was created in 2008 by Traditab at the initiative of a cooperative of small tobacco growers, Tabac Garonne Adour (TGA), that sought to improve the price paid for local tobacco growers.

    Anne-Marie Bracq

    Marketing began regionally, with an emphasis on tobacconists. “At that time, there weren’t many such products on offer, as organic tobacco products were popular,” says Anne-Marie Bracq, director of CTS France. “We started out with 20 tons of tobacco and grew step by step, explaining to tobacconists that if they choose to sell our products, they support their country’s growers.”

    It’s a concept that works well in France, which takes pride in domestically produced cheese and wine varieties that derive their identities from clearly demarcated origins. The company has applied the same philosophy to the other two markets. In Spain, for example, it has a sales force of 17 people.

    CTS works with 120 tobacco farmers in France, who are organized in the TGA cooperative and cultivate almost 300 ha in the region between Bordeaux and Lot-et-Garonne. The farms are small, with tobacco representing only one of a variety of crops, typically planted on 2 ha to 4 ha.

    While in Belgium, CTS works with only one or two growers, it cooperates with 150 growers of a cooperative in Spain, which cultivates tobacco for CTS’ RYO brands on 550 ha.

    Jerome Duffieux

    “In France, tobacco growing is not as much a tradition as in Spain, and Burley is the main variety, with flue-cured Virginia [FCV] being more of a filler type,” explains Jerome Duffieux, director of Traditab. “Burley production is more mechanized whereas FCV production is more of a manual process in France. In Spain, where farms are bigger and more specialized in tobacco, it’s the other way around; Spanish FCV is more aromatic.”

    Like Traditab, CTS aims to preserve a centuries-old regional tradition. “Our objective is to promote tobacco culture, which involves paying farmers an adequate price,” says Bracq. “This is also important in Spain. Extremadura produces 95 percent of Spain’s tobacco, accounting for 1,900 jobs, and provides €91 million ($95.83 million) to the region’s gross domestic product.”

    CTS’s bestselling 1637 brand was named after the year that tobaccos were first grown in the southwest of France.

    Expansion Planned

    The tobacco growers cooperating with CTS face a challenge shared by farmers in other fields of agriculture: finding successors when they retire. “Maybe it’s more difficult for tobacco because it’s difficult to promote from a health perspective,” says Bracq. “But we still have the problem of economic viability. At CTS, we are looking at ways to maintain tobacco cultivation, trying to develop a future for growers and [figuring out] how to support them economically. We are also running a program to find new farmers.”

    CTS plans to expand its current portfolio by developing a new RYO brand, but it’s not easy, according to Bracq. Almost three years ago, France raised tobacco excise taxes to €6.61—substantially above the EU average of €3.34.

    The government has continued raising RYO taxes since, thus eliminating the buffer function RYO usually plays between factory-made cigarettes and cheap illegal smokes. “A pack of 20 cigarettes now costs €11 and a 30-gram pouch of rolling tobacco €15 to 20,” explains Bracq. “The RYO segment is now declining more heavily than the cigarette market.”

    CTS is presently also involved in a cigar project. “We are developing cigars that are made of tobacco from southern France and plan to launch them in the next three years,” says Bracq.

    Stefanie Rossel is Tobacco Reporter’s editorial contributor. An experienced trade journalist, she combines sharp reporting skills with in-depth knowledge of the tobacco and vapor industries. Prior to joining Tobacco Reporter, Stefanie was editor-in-chief at Tobacco Journal International, where she worked for a decade. Fluent in English, German and French, Stefanie covers tobacco news around the world. She is based in Germany.
  • France’s Last Cigarette Factory Closing

    France’s Last Cigarette Factory Closing

    Image: Smeilov

    The last cigarette-making factory in France is set to close by the end of the year, according to the site’s owner, reports The Straits Times.

    The Manufacture Corse des Tabacs (Macotab) is located in Corsica, and it manufactures cigarettes for Philip Morris, which recently ended the contract.

    The factory is owned by SEITA, the former French monopoly. Now, around 30 employees work at the factory, down from 143 in the 1980s.

    In 2019, SEITA closed France’s tobacco processing factory located in the traditional growing region of the Dordogne.

    Legislation to reduce smoking and its related health issues has led to reductions in cigarette sales. Majority of European tobacco product production takes place in Germany and Poland.

  • France to Ban Disposables

    France to Ban Disposables

    Photo: YarikL

    France will ban disposable electronic cigarettes, according to a Reuters report citing comments by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.

    “It’s an important public health issue,” Borne said, noting that the government is putting together plans for a national program to fight tobacco usage.

    Borne said “puff” devices create habits among youth that can lead to tobacco addiction.

    Following a tobacco tax increase this year, the government does not plan to raise taxes next year.

    Source: