Tanzania Earns $50m from the Tobacco Industry

Source from:  East African Business Week 03/08/2015

The Tanzania goverment earns around $ 50million a year from the tobaaco industry as revenue.

Speaking to the East African Business Week in Dar es Salaam, recently the  Professor of Economics from the University of Dar es Salaam  (UDSM), Asmerom Kidane said that Tanzania is one of the largest countries in Africa both in area and population.

He said the export earning from Tobacco was $ 252.6million according to the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) and it constitutes 40% of the total export earnings from the traditional crops.

Professor Kidane said with regards to cigarette smoking, the overall  smoking prevalence rate is 12.4% for males, 8.8% for females and 10.6% overall and the overall estimate increase is 20.5% when the reference population is limited to adults 15 to 60 years.

Kidane,  a professor of Economics & Statistics at the University of Dar es Salaam said  the problems of tobacco companies' policies and practices are common to high, low and middle income countries although the latter are more vulnerable.

Kidane noted that environmentally, tobacco farming is responsible for causing more than four per cent of desertification Urambo area,  Tanzania. Urambo,  one of the major tobacco growing districts in the country lost about 1.3 m3 trees to tobacco farming worth more than $10.5 million in 2010/2011 alone

Professor Kidane said: "The tobacco companies also lie in claiming that farmers have no economically-viable alternative crops. More than 70 per cent of the tobacco farmers interviewed in Tanzania said they preferred growing alternative crops which they identified; their only worry was sustainable markets for such crops."

The executive director of the Tanzania Tobacco Control Forum (TTCF),  Lutgard Kokulinda Kagaruki: "Tobacco production and cigarette consumption in the world  appear to be among major health issues, and Tanzania is not an exception."

In efforts to check diseases which sometimes lead to death from tobacco consumption, she said, Tanzania signed a pact to control tobacco production and cigarette consumption in 2007. However, the government's role in effecting that deal has not been particularly  felt to-date!

"The government has been dilly-dallying in implementing the pact to control tobacco production as well as its wider outdoor advertising which propel young people into smoking at their tender age," she lamented.

According to her, one of the most effective ways of controlling the high rate of cigarette consumption seen in Tanzania is to increase taxes on tobacco. Studies have revealed that increasing excise tax on tobacco would not only reduce consumption of same, but would also help generate more revenues for the government!

Despite calls by activists to eliminate tobacco production in Tanzania, tobacco is not even a crucial source of income for Tanzanian farmers nowadays, with a number of them shifting to growing other crops!

Kagaruki says  it is estimated that more than five million people died from tobacco related causes in the year 2012  and, unless effective control measures are taken,  that number will swell to eight million deaths by 2030!

According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, the prevalence rate of tobacco consumption among Tanzanian adults (25 to 64 years of age) is estimated at 23% countrywide.

Kagaruki underscored that the prevalence rate among Tanzanians aged 13-to-15 years is 3.8% for males - and 0.4% for females. The  prevalence rate in the East African region is 29 per cent for males, and four per cent for females.

In Tanzania, for example, tobacco farm labour is sold to big farmers for between $80 and $100 a person. The labourers are invariably subjected to harsh conditions and long working hours just for the food and substandard shelter they get: mere slaves. Enditem