Namibia: Health Fights Tobacco Project

Source from:  namibian 03/13/2015

The planned tobacco project in Zambezi region will face stiff objections from the ministry of health.

A deputy director of public health in the ministry echoed the sentiments expressed by outgoing health minister Richard Kamwi.

Benson Ntomwa said Namibia has seen an increase in non-communicable diseases like cancer which can be caused by smoking.

He said tobacco growing should not be seen as a priority for poverty reduction, neither should it be something Namibia as a country and Zambezi as a region in particular, should see as a panacea for unemployment.

"I am objecting entirely. There is no development in something which has a negative effect on people's health," he said during an interview with The Namibian yesterday.

A Chinese company, Namibia Oriental Tobacco cc, has applied for 10 000 hectares in Zambezi for growing tobacco and maize. Last week, the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement carried an advertisement calling for objections to the Chinese company's application for land at Liselo.

On Tuesday Swapo Oshikoto regional coordinator Armas Amukwiyu told The Namibian he spent a good number of years in China looking for potential investors for the project, which he says is his brainchild.

"He came back with a wrong project. How can we have a tobacco project while the whole world is moving away from it and replacing it with less harmful products?" Ntomwa said, adding that all member countries of the World Health Organisation adopted a framework convention on tobacco control. Namibia is one of those countries.

Ntomwa called on all Namibians to stand up and save their lives and those of others. He noted that Namibia adopted and implemented effective legislative measures to prevent and reduce the consumption of tobacco which was passed by the National Assembly as the Tobacco Control Act No 1 of 2010.

"It has nothing to do with a single region but involves the whole country. The 3 000 people to be employed will be exposed to dangerous drugs, and it is likely that their families will also be exposed. Do we choose money over the lives of our people?" Ntomwa further asked.

"We are not against development but there is a difference between sustainable development and destructive development," he concluded.

The director of forestry in the agriculture ministry Joseph Hailwa said the ministry will not authorise clearing a large tract of land for tobacco.

Hailwa said he received the application for clearance from Namibia Oriental Tobacco cc at the end of last year and forwarded it to the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, which he says is key to any approval.

"We want to avoid the establishment of the whole project. That is our first option. We will not clear a forest because of tobacco," Hailwa said. However, his ministry can only make recommendations.

Hailwa said if the ministry has no other option, the project must be reduced by half or a quarter of the current size.

"It must be done by piloting size so that if things go wrong, we have a small area to rehabilitate. Ten thousand hectares is too much land," Hailwa said.

He further said once tobacco causes damage to a piece of land, the risk of clearing it and rehabilitating it is too high.

"Maize is just the element they know we want to hear that is why they bring it in," Hailwa said adding that tobacco will definitely be the main crop.

Although The Namibian understands that the Chinese company has already been given the land by the Mwafe traditional authority, the Communal Land Act says "no person shall, without the written approval of the minister, be entitled to be allocated and to acquire any customary land right in respect of communal land which exceeds the maximum size which the minister, in consultation with the minister responsible for agricultural affairs, may prescribe for the purposes of this subsection." Enditem