A tried-and-tested method of tobacco control

The pro-reproductive health bill lobby group obviously has a huge public relations war chest amounting to millions.
The fact alone that they can afford to go into TV advertising is a clear indication of this.

I have not had the time to watch television lately but in the few times that I did, I was able to see that professionally produced and slick ad featuring one of the principal reproductive health bill advocates, senatorial wannabe Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel.

Now those TV ads are expensive to produce and even more costly to show. I heard that the average cost of a 30-second ad on primetime is P500,000.

It would be interesting to know who is funding those expensive TV ads of Hontiveros-Baraquel.

I don’t think it’s Hontiveros-Baraquel’s party list group Akbayan which is providing the millions, either.

Akbayan is overextended as it is now with its many advocacies from the impeachment of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez to the postponement of the ARMM election

If not Akbayan, is it the pharmaceutical companies and the condom manufacturers who are funding the pro-RH bill ad? After all, these companies expect their business to grow significantly once the bill becomes a law.

The condom manufacturers were already running TV ads before, including one featuring action star Robin Padilla. Thus, it would not be a problem for them to divert some of their advertising budget for Hontiveros-Baraquel’s TV ads which is an even better investment for them,

Or is the TV campaign being funded by international agencies that have been pushing the Philippines to adopt a more aggressive and effective population control program?

For a long time, these international agencies have been providing hundreds of millions worth of free condoms and contraceptives. Certainly, their objectives will be served by the passage of the RH bill.

We hope that the ads are not being funded by the government. We know that President Benigno Aquino III has thrown his full support behind the passage of the bill. IN fact, he has announced that he would continue to do so despite talks that he could be excommunicated for this. The Palace must be warned, though, that there are possible legal implications for government funding for such an advocacy campaign.

Perhaps Hontiveros-Baraquel should just end the speculation by telling the public just exactly which group funded her TV ad.

A heavy smoker like President Aquino should know the health hazards of smoking. We’re sure that his doctors have told him often enough the health risks he is taking by continuing to smoke.

So it would not be surprising that even a smoker like the President would see the wisdom of the government implementing an honest-to-goodness program to reduce smoking in the country.

The Philippines has been identified as one of the countries which have a high smoking prevalence and weak tobacco controls. This was according to a study conducted by Professors Simon Chapman and K. Alechnowicz of the University of Sydney.

“The Philippines has seen some of the world’s most extreme and controversial forms of tobacco promotion flourish. Against international standards of progress, the Philippines is among the world’s slowest nations to take tobacco control seriously,” the study noted.

The Alechnowicz-Chapman study concluded that unlike its Asian counterparts, the Philippines lags far behind when it comes to tobacco control. The study pointed out, for instance, that it took decades before the Philippines could even put in place health warnings on the front panel of every tobacco product package even if this has long been the practice in other Asian countries like Brunei, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore.

The study said that ineffective tobacco controls have made the Philippines the largest consumer of tobacco products among countries in Southeast Asia. In the world, we rank 15th.

The President may be convinced of the need for a more effective tobacco use control program if he asks for a briefing from the Department of Health on the health and productivity costs of cigarette smoking.

He would be told that cigarette smoking is costing the health system billions every year to attend to smoking related diseases. The cost to productivity is of course billions more.

The tried-and-tested method of reducing cigarette and tobacco consumption is of course to raise the cost of cigarettes and tobacco through taxes.

No less than Philip Morris Fortune Tobacco Corp. President Chris Nelson has admitted this when he told media that despite higher excise tax rate this year on tobacco, actual government collections are likely to go down because higher cigarette prices will dampen consumption.

But government revenue from tobacco and cigarettes need not necessarily go down as claimed by Nelson even with reduced consumption. That is, if only the government could implement a more efficient tax collection scheme that would plug loopholes and prevent tax evasion by the tobacco companies.

Suspiciously, the cigarette manufacturers themselves have made proposals to the government systems that they saw would plug those tax collection loopholes.

Philip Morris, for example, has proposed to use bar codes to track and appropriately tax cigarettes as they leave the manufacturing plans. This proposal is apparently a big joke since bar codes can easily be tampered with. In fact, bar codes are available everywhere including Recto.

Another firm, the China-based Huagong Tech. Co. Ltd., is proposing a hologram-aided tax stamp.

It is important to note that the proposal to use bar codes and hologram tax stamp are coming from the tobacco companies themselves and not from independent parties.

Philip Morris has taken pains to explain that the bar code scheme would be run by third parties and would always be under the control and supervision of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

As we said, a proposal coming from the cigarette manufacturers so that the government can collect the right taxes from them is highly suspicious, to say the least. The appropriate analogy here is putting the fox in charge of the chicken house.

Instead of adopting the dubious scheme proposed by Philip Morris, the government should put in place a truly independent and proven system offered by a true impartial party to plug the leaks on tobacco taxes.

One system that both the World Health Organization and the Global Adult Tobacco Survey proponents are recommending to help the government collect the right amount of taxes from tobacco product is the strip-stamp system.

This fool-proof, hi-tech system involves the use of sensors and strip stamps in all cigarette and cigar packs to electronically monitor the production and distribution of these products.

The global Swiss firm Sicpa Security Solutions SA has long proposed this cutting-edge technology to Malacañang, which it said would earn an additional P100 billion over a seven-year period alone via the more accurate collection that cigarette and tobacco companies are supposed to pay to the government.

This is not an empty boast. Sicpa has a track record in California, Turkey and Brazil to show. In these economies, the use of the Sicpa system has resulted in higher tax collections and curbed smuggling.

The best gauge that the Sicpa system would be effective is the vehemence of the objections of the local cigarette manufacturers to the Sicpa proposal. It seems that the cigarette manufacturers know it would work so they don’t want the government to adopt it.