By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter Expenditure on tobacco can represent a high percentage of household income, sometimes higher than that on education or health World Health Organisation.
POOR PEOPLE are channelling more of their meagre incomes into cigarette smoking, intensifying a vicious cycle of poverty in marginal families. This is the current focus of international health experts, analysing the statistics on cigarette smoking and its impact on health.
The health experts highlight a vicious cycle of poor people spending too much on tobacco which in turn deprive them of adequate nutrition, the development of chronic diseases which they cannot afford treat and eventually death. They also highlight the burden of health care, at the national level, as a result of the increase in tobacco use among poorer people especially in low-income countries.
The World Health Organisation's (WHO's) World No Tobacco Day publication 'Tobacco and poverty: A vicious circle' indicates that while richer households with more access to information on living well are curtailing their use of tobacco, poorer households (especially in developing countries) are spending a larger proportion of their income on tobacco. In Mexico, in 1998, the poorest 20 per cent of households, spent nearly 11 per cent of their household income on tobacco compared to the 1.5 per cent of income spent by the richest 20 per cent on tobacco.
This diversion of income is further depriving poor families of adequate nutrition, education and health care. The poorest households in Bangladesh for instance, spend almost 10 times as much on tobacco as on education.
The report notes that "in the case of the poorest households, where a
significant portion of income is devoted to food, expenditures on tobacco can mean the
difference between
an adequate diet and
malnutrition".
The lure, according to WHO, is the attractive, mass-targeted tobacco advertising and eventually, nicotine addiction. The WHO states that the addiction to nicotine drives people to spend money on cigarettes even though they do not have enough money to purchase food and other necessities.
Tobacco use not only increases household poverty but, according to the WHO, at the macro level, it's a financial burden on countries including increased health-care costs, lost productivity due to illness and early death, foreign exchange losses, lost revenues on smuggled cigarettes and environmental damage.
In terms of health care costs, tobacco use accounts for between six and 15 per cent of the total health care costs of rich countries; in dollar terms that more than U.S. $157 billion in annual health-related costs in a country such as the United States. A developing country such as Egypt, according to WHO, spends about US $545.5 million each year to treat diseases related to tobacco use.
SMOKING AND POVERTY
In Egypt, more than 10 per cent of household expenditures in lower-income households went for cigarettes or other tobacco products.
Preliminary results from an ongoing study in three provinces of Viet Nam found that over the course of a year, smokers spent 3.6 times more on tobacco than on education; 2.5 times more for tobacco than clothes; and 1.9 times more for tobacco than for health care.
The average amount spent by poor households in Morocco on tobacco was virtually the same as the amount spent on education and more than one-half the amount spent on health.
Even homeless children in India spent a significant portion of their income purchasing tobacco, often prioritising tobacco over food.
