His Excellency Prithivirajsing Roopun, President of Mauritius
Dr the Hon Kailesh Kumar Singh Jagutpal Health Minister of Mauritius:,
Her Excellency Mrs Peggy Vidot Health Minister of Seychelles
UN Resident Coordinator for Mauritius and Seychelles Mrs. Linda Singh
Other authorities from the government of Mauritius and invited countries
Colleagues from WHO country and regional offices and from headquarters
Friends from Bloomberg Philanthropies,
Ladies and gentlemen:
It is a pleasure for me to be here today, on behalf of the Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, to celebrate the launching of the 9th edition of the WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic and the achievements of this beautiful country, Mauritius, in tobacco control.
Since the entry into force of the WHO FCTC, 18 years ago, we have seen an enormous progress in tobacco control throughout the world. The introduction of the MPOWER package 15 years ago, a technical tool developed by WHO as an entry point for the full implementation of the WHO FCTC, has been of enormous value.
The achievements so far, are testimony of the importance of governments, civil society, international organizations and donors working together, in the framework of a powerful of a legally biding instrument, as the WHO FCTC. And the Convention Secretariat is proud of the partnership that we have with all these groups.
Today, with the advances shown by the WHO Report, we see that countries of all levels of development, wealth and size, can and are advancing in tobacco control. Political will and hard work are a common denominator to all of them.
Mauritius is one of the only four countries, that have reached the implementation of the MPOWER measures at the level of best practice, and I congratulate you together with Brazil, Netherlands and Turkye.
Still, we need to pay attention to numbers, four countries with high implementation of the MPOWER measures, a little more than 40 lacking one or two measures to reach that level, but still the WHO FCTC has 182 Parties and the Convention goes beyond the MPOWER measures.
That is why today, while celebrating the advances obtained, I want to call for strengthening and accelerating the implementation of the treaty. Measures like Article 8 of the Convention, protection of people from tobacco smoke, should be almost universal today.
Also, we need to remember, that tobacco control can never be taken for granted. The tobacco industry has been, is and will keep on being the main obstacle for the implementation of the treaty. And they never cease to work, using phony arguments to try to stop, delay or water down any regulation.
As a touristic country you may have heard the argument that tourists will not be coming for vacations anymore if you ban smoking in public places, the economy will suffer, you will lose revenue…
In all the years that I have been working in tobacco control, I have never seen solid, unbiased evidence of a country losing revenue in any sector, hotels, restaurants, tourism, for being smoke free. And there are more than 70 countries that are smoke-free today, some of them small island developing countries like Mauritius. Some of them are doing even better after getting totally smoke-free; since usually the tourists belong to the high-income sectors, of developed countries that are the ones who smoke less nowadays.
And talking about the economy, if there is something that we learned from the COVID 19 pandemic, is that good economy and good health are not opposite goals. In fact, you need to have a healthy population if you want to have sustained economic growth.
Tobacco use hinders sustainable development because it attacks its three pillars: the social, the economic and the environment. The social costs due to tobacco related diseases and death are well known eight million death a year, but also tobacco cost the economy at least 1.8% of the gross domestic product annually. Tobacco farming is detrimental to the environment, as are the cigarette butts, the most frequent item found in the litter on the costs. They don’t only poison soils and water, they also increase plastic pollution.
To finalize I want again to congratulate Mauritius for its achievement and for being a role model, not only for Africa and for the small developing islands, but also for the whole world.
Thank you very much.
Related
Guidelines for implementation of Article 8: Protection from exposure to tobacco smoke