Turkmenistan has increased excise rates on imports of tobacco products to 181.25 percent of the customs value effective Jan. 2025, reports Turkmenportal. The minimum tax rate will be $7.81 per pack.
Meanwhile, the government increase the excise tax rate on other tobacco and industrial tobacco substitutes from $30.5 per kg to $38.13 per kg.
In February 2022, Turkmenistan adopted a national program for 2022-2025 aimed at achieving “tobacco-free” status.
Turkmenistan has set a goal of becoming tobacco-free by 2025, Kristina Mauer-Stender, program manager for tobacco control at the World Health Organization’s regional office for Europe, said in an interview reported by AzerNews.
As has become ‘normal’, ‘tobacco-free’ is here defined as the point at which the number of smokers in the country no longer exceeds five percent of the adult population.
“I would like to stress that it is very important for other countries to learn from Turkmenistan’s positive experience,” she said.
Turkmenistan has a leading position in the fight against tobacco smoking. As of April 2016, the country was said to have recorded the lowest smoking rate (8.3 percent) in WHO’s European region.
Turkmenistan ratified the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2011.
And it was said to have adopted a national action plan for tobacco control that included raising public awareness, strengthening relevant legislation and regulations, governing the sale of tobacco products to minors, and strengthening co-operation with international organizations.
Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov is pushing ahead with his plan to make the country tobacco-free by 2025, according to a story in The Times of Central Asia quoting a Turkmen state media report.
The state-run newspaper Neitralny Turkmenistan reported that the president had signed a program ordering measures to be taken during the next five years to push his initiative.
Berdymukhammedov has been a proponent of healthy living and has made it a key aspect of his ‘autocratic rule’, the Times said.
In 2013, he banned the sale of cigarettes in state stores during the month of April each year, according to local media reports.
The country aimed to become the first ‘tobacco-free country in the European region’ by reducing its smoking rate to five percent or lower by 2025.
The actions undertaken by the government so far have included ratification in 2011 of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, enactment of a comprehensive tobacco control law in 2013, and the provision of free support and counselling services for individuals trying to give up smoking.
The government was said also to be implementing the WHO tobacco control project, ‘Implementation of the Ashgabat Declaration: Towards the Tobacco Free European Region for 2015-2018’.