British American Tobacco deliberately sought to undermine health experts’ work on tobacco control in Southern Africa in the early 1990s.
And it did so partly by wooing carefully-selected journalists, according to company documents seen by Sapa.
The documents are part of a collection of over eight million pages of material that BAT made public at a depository in Guildford, England, as part of its settlement of a smoking damages case.
Although the depository was established in 1998, researchers are still sifting through the papers. BAT is the second-largest transnational tobacco manufacturer in the world after Philip Morris, selling some 900-billion cigarettes a year worldwide.
Its South African subsidiary controls 95% of the local market, with brands including Peter Stuyvesant, Benson & Hedges and Lucky Strike. Much of the company’s concern in the early 1990s centered on what the documents term the ”outspoken, infamous anti-tobacco campaigner from South Africa”, Dr Derek Yach.
Yach, then an epidemiologist with the Medical Research Council, is now the World Health Organisation’s Geneva-based executive director of noncommunicable diseases.
In 1993 he was one of the leading figures behind the WHO-backed All Africa Conference on Tobacco Control, held in Harare that November.
According to a BAT strategy document compiled in June that year after a group meeting of the company’s public affairs managers from southern and East Africa, Harare was likely to be the forerunner to similar ”high profile attacks on the industry”.
”Even if this conference has a minimal impact, the fact that it is happening at all necessitates the need for action,” it said.
BAT’s objective should be to ”minimise the impact of the conference” through a comprehensive media relations programme, the group, known by the acronym Parg, suggested.
The Parg document proposed a media seminar in South Africa, with a budget of over $90 000.
The journalists would be addressed by ”independent” and tobacco industry experts on issues including environmental tobacco smoke, young people and smoking, the WHO and health priorities, and the ”politicisation of science”.
The aim of the seminar was to ”make the media take our views more seriously and to increase the chances that they will offer us the chance to comment as issues arise”.
”Care should be taken in selection of journalists,” the document said.
The seminar should be held ”somewhere pleasant usually a beach resort. This motivates the journalists to attend”.
In what appears to have been a bizarre attempt to distract media attention from Harare, PARG also recommended that BAT highlight what it said was an international Aids conference being held in Uganda the same month.
”BATCo to devise plan to gain publicity for the conference,” says a cryptic note in the document.
WHO and MRC staff have been unable to identify an Aids conference that took place in Uganda then.
The document said that to boost BAT’s general corporate image, the company should create a ”Tobacco Republic” model for Africa.
”Using factors such as employment, exports, taxes, land farmed etc, it is possible to build a country with a population and economy entirely dependent on tobacco.
”Once all of these factors are collated for every country in Africa using existing information an impressive fictional country can be created to show the important social and economic contribution of tobacco in the region.”
It said a similar exercise had been completed in Latin America and the results used in local and international lobbying.
The Johannesburg-based National Council Against Smoking said last week that BAT, through its subsidiary United Tobacco, did in fact organise a pre-Harare media junket, at Mount Sheba resort in what is now Mpumalanga.
NCAS executive director Yussuf Saloojee said this junket and others in 1996 and 1999 were ”pure propaganda events for the tobacco industry”.
”As long ago as 1970 tobacco industry scientists in private memos acknowledged that it was beyond all reasonable doubt that cigarette smoke caused cancer, yet the journalists were told the contrary, and repeated this lie in banner headlines,” he said.
”Since 1953, the tobacco industry has had one objective: not to reduce the harm caused by its products but to reduce the public fears.
”For them, smoking is not a health problem but a public relations problem.”
Commenting on the Parg document, BAT South Africa representative Gladys Mawoneke said last week that perceptions of tobacco had changed, and with them the expectations of what it meant to be a responsible tobacco company in the 21st century.
”Clearly what was said and done ten or 20 years ago is not true of today or the future,” she said. ”Not much is. Our aim is to keep in step with society’s views on tobacco as they change over time.
”We do not seek to undermine or stand in the way of health experts or authorities. In fact, we share many of their views. It is regrettable that some individuals choose not to speak or meet with us and see our views as propaganda.
”We do, however, want to ensure that our voice is heard.” BAT was very open about the fact that it manufactured and marketed a product that was a cause of diseases including lung cancer, and that quitting smoking could be difficult.
It was ready to engage with government and health bodies to find sensible ways of reducing the health impact of smoking, while maintaining the industry’s R5,5-billion-plus economic contribution to South African society.
BAT today was committed to meeting its business objectives ”in a manner consistent with reasonable expectations of a responsible tobacco company in the 21st century”, Mawoneke said.
— In 2000 a WHO report found international tobacco companies had worked secretly to combat and discredit WHO efforts to curb smoking. It found BAT and Philip Morris sought to undermine an international conference on tobacco in Buenos Aires in 1992, partly by staging diversions. – Sapa