Bangladesh

By Syed Mahbubul Alam
Program Manager, WBB Trust

Smoking rates in Bangladesh are fairly high among men, and rates of smokeless tobacco use are high in women. While no good statistics are available, it is estimated that 36.8% of people over age 15 use tobacco, 41% of men and 1.8% of women are smokers, and 14.8% of men and 24.4% of women use smokeless tobacco.

The Government of Bangladesh has in recent years taken strong steps to control the use of tobacco. It ratified the FCTC on 14 June 2004, passed a comprehensive tobacco control law on 26 March 2005, and passed rules to further define the law on 30 May 2006. The law bans all forms of advertising and promotion of tobacco and makes many public places smokefree. It also mandates warnings on cigarette packs covering 30% of the front and back surfaces and involving six rotating warnings. Since the passage of the law and rules, advertising of tobacco has declined significantly, if not entirely disappeared.

In order to strengthen local and national collaboration for tobacco control, the government has also established a National Tobacco Control Cell and a National Tobacco Control Task Force, the latter including NGO members throughout the country.

The Bangladesh Anti-Tobacco Alliance (BATA), of which the Secretariat is WBB Trust (Work for a Better Bangladesh), has learned many lessons over the course of advocating successfully for these policies and initiatives. These include:

1. The importance of sensitising important people: policy makers, civil society, journalists, and parliamentarians.
2. Co-operation between government, NGOs, WHO and the media is critical for success. No single group could have achieved the notable successes of Bangladesh by acting alone.
3. Persistence, hard work, and a coordinated effort pay off - as long as there is strong strategic planning and repeated checking to ensure the programme is on track.
4. The work isn’t over when the law is passed. In some ways, law passage is only another beginning, with hard work following to ensure proper implementation.

Difficulties still being faced in tobacco control in Bangladesh include weaknesses in the law and its enforcement. Some advertising remains. While the current pack warnings are a vast improvement on the previous ones, they are not pictorial, and thus of little use for the large portion of the population which is illiterate. Sales of single sticks continue. Restaurants are not considered as a public place in the law, and satellite television channels continue to run tobacco adverts.

A further significant weakness is that the government has yet to adopt a strong policy on taxation of tobacco products, with taxation levels remaining low and many companies evading paying the existing tax.

Current and future steps include supporting government to enforce the tobacco control law; strengthening government-NGO collaboration to continue tobacco control work; capacity building of government-NGOs to monitor and enforce the tobacco control law; and strengthening existing legislation in order to match – and hopefully exceed – minimum requirements of the FCTC. Finally, coordinated work is needed to push for a strong tax policy.

The work will not be easy. Major challenges ahead include:

• the renewal of advocacy efforts for pictorial warnings, which were intensively challenged by the industry
• the need to remove all remaining indirect advertisements
• the need to strengthen legal provisions and enforcement to guarantee that all public places and public transport become smokefree
• advocacy to prohibit the sale of single sticks
• a concerted campaign to overcome industry and other resistance to policies for tobacco taxation and tackling smuggling and tax evasion

It is anticipated that funding from the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use will be of great importance in furthering the above efforts to build on past successes and address existing gaps in tobacco control.

References
⁽¹⁾ The laws or regulations http://www.bata.globalink.org/law.htm
⁽²⁾ Reports and publications http://www.bata.globalink.org/research.htm
⁽³⁾ Other material http://www.bata.globalink.org/materials.htm