EU must seize its chance to close door on Big Tobacco’s corrosive influence, says Wopke Hoekstra

Just days before COP28 kicked off in Dubai, EU climate czar Wopke Hoekstra boldly called on China to help fund climate disaster recovery efforts in the Global South.

Yet the controversial Commissioner’s own fossil fuel industry ties have added to concerns over Big Oil influence infiltrating the UAE-hosted climate talks, notably prompting the European Parliament’s recently-passed COP28 Resolution demanding that the UN shield climate action plans from corporate manipulation, “like the World Health Organisation (WHO) did to the tobacco industry.”

Despite the WHO’s warnings, however, the tobacco industry’s insidious influence is still deeply marking European policy.

Indeed, Big Tobacco’s lobbying continues to hinder the EU’s Tobacco-Free Generation’ policy ambitions, with the industry’s corrosive presence both fueling Europe’s illicit tobacco trade and undermining efforts to stub it out.

With the EU entering the final phases of crucial tobacco control policy revisions, Brussels should take inspiration from recent legislative proposals in France and align its approach with the WHO’s Protocol to Eliminate Trade in Tobacco Products to fend off the industry’s advances.

Big Tobacco hiding behind smokescreen

Tobacco consumption remains the largest cause of premature death in Europe, killing nearly 700,000 people every year. While the bloc has seen some progress in recent years, EU smoking numbers are still high, with over one-quarter of its citizens and nearly 30% of young Europeans using tobacco.

This latter group, along with low-income communities, are particularly vulnerable to Europe’s growing illicit tobacco trade, whose cheaper prices and accessibility lead to increased smoking levels and a range of socioeconomic consequences.

Beyond exacerbating public health gaps and increasing overall health spending to treat smoking-related illness, the EU’s tobacco black market robs its member states of an estimated €20 billion in annual excise tax revenue, severely hindering their capacity tackle this scourge and fund anti-poverty programmes.

While the tobacco industry is quick to pin the blame on cigarette smuggling to high taxes in EU countries, the WHO has cited a range of studies establishing that corruption has a greater impact on smuggling levels than cigarette prices, adding that illicit trade levels are generally higher in low-tax countries.

What’s more, Big Tobacco overemphasises the rise of EU-based counterfeit production – a trend that the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) has flagged with its recent seizures – to take the heat off of itself.

These cigarettes represent just the tip of the illicit trade iceberg. In reality, contraband tobacco – genuine industry product that ends up on the black market – still comprises the lion’s share of the problem, with Europe’s “illicit whites” accounting for as much as 95% of global cigarette seizures.

Exposing industry’s true colours

Indeed, as emphasised in a recent legislative proposal brought forward by a group of French MPs from the Horizons party – a member of Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble majority coalition – cigarette manufacturers “are not victims” of the illicit tobacco trade, but active participants.

In France, a black-market hotspot, Big Tobacco has played a central role in building the two main avenues on which illicit cigarettes are pouring into the country. By both manipulating factory production in low-tax, high-corruption jurisdictions – including Bulgaria, Ukraine and Algeria – and intentionally oversupplying retailers in small countries such as Andorra and Luxembourg, the industry has ensured that substantial flows of contraband cigarettes can find their way into larger, more lucrative markets.

As the University of Bath’s renowned Tobacco Control Research Group (TCRG) has pointed out, Big Tobacco’s well-documented involvement in cigarette smuggling significantly benefits manufacturers’ bottom lines by enabling them to circumvent taxes and sell higher volumes to retailers, whose payments they retain regardless their products’ eventual sale on the black market. In light of this reality, the Horizons MPs’ legislative initiative – spearheaded by Frédéric Valletoux – calls for the long-overdue domestic implementation of the WHO’s Protocol eight years after France’s ratification.

In France, and more broadly the EU – which ratified the Protocol in 2016 – there remains a deeply problematic gap between the Protocol’s requirements for tackling the illicit tobacco trade and actual policy approaches.

At the heart of the issue is continued interference from the tobacco industry, whose covert lobbying practices and manipulation of the tender and consultation processes for the EU’s anti-smuggling track and trace system – as exposed by the European Public Health Alliance, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and TCRG, respectively – has given cigarette manufactures undue influence over the bloc’s crucial tobacco control policies.

EU has a narrow window to change course

Concretely, this influence has resulted in the industry’s outsized role in the EU track and trace system via its inheritance of Philip Morris-developed Codentify technology – today known as Inexto Suite – as a recent Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) report has spotlighted, as well as disruption to Brussels’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) and Tobacco Taxation Directive (TTD) overhauls.

As part of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and its “Tobacco-Free Generation” 2040 goal, the EU Commission is reviewing its tobacco control framework, creating a vital opportunity to align both directives with WHO Protocol obligations and NGO recommendations.

Yet while the proposed revisions were originally slated for late last year, the SFP has attributed the ongoing delays to Big Tobacco’s lobbying interference, as has the Valletoux-led group of French MPs concerning the Protocol’s still-pending EU implementation, which was meant for 2023.

To push back against Big Tobacco, Valletoux’s proposal notably focuses on the Protocol’s provisions for imposing domestic tobacco delivery quotas to impede the industry’s cynical oversupplying of ‘looser’ markets, as well as its requirements for monitoring factory production and maintaining the industry independence of track and trace systems.

Beyond France, the proposal calls for the European Parliament (EP) to integrate these proposals into the TPD-TTD revision process.

In this endeavour, Stéphane Séjourné, leader of the EP’s Renew Europe group and a close Macron ally, is ideally positioned to work closely with EP President Roberta Metsola and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to ensure the bloc takes a long-overdue stand against the tobacco industry before the window of opportunity closes after next year’s elections.

EU policymakers still have time to steer its tobacco control agenda in the right direction.

In the decisive period to come, Brussels’s leaders will need to block out Big Tobacco’s wide-ranging arsenal of manipulation and let the health and well-being of European citizens guide the decisions that will most impact their lives.