The International Tobacco Growers Association (ITGA) has launched a global petition with the aim of getting tobacco growers around the world to sign a document which calls on governments to reject the World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control's (FCTC) draft proposals on articles 9, 10, 17 and 18.

The ITGA, representing more than 30 million tobacco farmers around the world, accuses the WHO of being out of touch with reality and completely ignoring pleas by tobacco farmers in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world.The ITGA’s wrath is prompted by the WHO’s decision to present final guidelines for adoption by the 171 member countries of the FCTC at a meeting to take place in Uruguay in November 2010. The WHO has also recently rejected the ITGA’s application to attend this meeting.
The guidelines for FCTC articles 9 and 10 would ban the use of ingredients other than tobacco in cigarette production. These ingredients are necessary in the manufacture of blended tobacco products, composed primarily of burley and oriental tobacco, which account for more than half the cigarettes smoked in the world, outside China. Without them, farmers of burley and oriental would see demand for their crops disappear.
The recommendations for articles 17 and 18 are meant to provide viable crop alternatives to tobacco growing, but fail to present economically feasible options for tobacco farmers. The proposal risks decimating growers’ livelihoods, condemning millions to a life of poverty and crippling the economies of many developing countries — the very same countries the WHO is funded to help.
In a controversial move, the WHO has decided to exclude tobacco growers from the consultation process around these and other guidelines of the FCTC, claiming that they would interfere with their development. The move appears to contradict the FCTC progress report for articles 17 and 18 in which one of the guiding principles states "Tobacco growers and workers should be involved at every stage of policy development and implementation."
The results of the ITGA's will be publicised in late October at the association's annual meeting in Kentucky. Its launch comes a week after member countries of Comesa, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, at the recently concluded 14th summit of Comesa in Swaziland, resolved to petition the UN at the upcoming UN General Assembly to audit the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in New York. The 19-member economic bloc argues that the WHO move is one of many by Western powers and international agencies to perpetuate poverty in Africa, using health arguments to edge its products — in this case tobacco — out of the global market. It is hoped that the bigger economies of the bloc such as Egypt, Libya and Kenya, despite not being major producers of tobacco, will play a role in influencing opinion to overturn this ban. "I am afraid it's a very alarming situation for many countries, and hence the reason the 19 Comesa countries have united, and for the first time ever, decided to oppose the WHO," said Francois van der Merwe, chairman of the African chapter of the International Tobacco Growers Association. (pi)