Negotiators set to resume talks next week on UN-backed anti-tobacco treaty

Negotiators from Members States of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) are set to resume talks aimed at developing global rules to curb the advertising, promotion, sales and smuggling of tobacco products.

The fifth session of the Inter-governmental Negotiating Body, which opens on Monday, is expected to examine a new text of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) that proposes options culled from of four years of negotiations.

Advocating strong global action, WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland said at the time WHO initiated the FCTC process, tobacco killed 4 million people every year. "Today that figure stands at 4.9 million people per year," she noted. "A strong FCTC will save lives - let us all remember that delays means more deaths, and more children falling prey to tobacco."

Over the past four years, tobacco has become a major threat to developing countries, which many tobacco companies have targeted to compensate for stagnating markets in Europe and North America, according to WHO. In some countries, more than 60 per cent of 13 to 15 year-olds use tobacco and almost a quarter of those young smokers had their first cigarette before the age of ten.

Negotiators have also focused on the role of the tobacco industry, especially its attempts to derail the ongoing talks, WHO said, urging Member States to be vigilant about tactics used by the tobacco industry and their surrogates "to raise issues extraneous to the core of the negotiations or propose irrelevant solutions."