Philip Morris Campaign in Kazakhstan (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

May 7, 1998, "Tobacco giant tells young Kazakhs not to smoke," Reuters

By Philippa Fletcher 

ALMATY, May 7 (Reuters) - U.S. tobacco giant Philip Morris (MO - news), its
fingers burning at home over the dangers of cigarettes, felt the heat abroad
on Thursday when it took its anti-youth-smoking message to the former Soviet
Union.

The company unveiled its first campaign to discourage under-age smoking in
Kazakhstan, a steppeland nation twice the size of Texas where it uses a
Kazakh horseman to promote its brands as well as the American cowboy
familiar elsewhere.

The group, which said it has 70 percent of the local market through its
local subsidiary, joined forces with the Kazakh Education, Culture and
Health Ministry to send its message, contained in a series of posters aimed
at schoolchildren.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a former Communist party boss who rules with
little opposition, has spoken out against smoking and demanded that tobacco
firms fund anti-smoking campaigns.

``Children should study, not smoke,'' runs a poster featuring a girl playing
on a computer. ``Childhood curiosity should not extend to smoking,'' says
another with a boy and a model boat.

Fourteen billboards will go up in two cities in June. This month 5,000
posters will be distributed to schools in the country of 16 million, where
deputy minister Yerlan Aryn said at least one in six children smoked.

It is part of a worldwide campaign by Philip Morris to counter charges, laid
most recently by U.S. corporate watchdog group INFACT last month, of
marketing cigarettes to young people overseas to make up for shrinking
markets at home.

Representatives of the Almaty Tobacco Company (ATK), a plant in Kazakhstan's
commercial capital bought by Philip Morris Cos Inc in 1993, stressed they
were against under-age smoking.

``ATK and Philip Morris are aware of the controversial nature of tobacco
products. However, we have consistently acknowledged that smoking is a
decision for adults and that under-age people should not smoke,'' said ATK
President Mark Duerst.

Duerst said the campaign was part of Philip Morris's plan to be a model
investor in Kazakhstan. ATK corporate affairs director Robert May said the
firm had already spent $228 million modernising the factory, of a total $340
million pledged. ``We declared a profit last year for the first time and
paid a dividend to shareholders,'' said May. He declined to name a figure,
saying it was symbolic in comparison to the investment.

But some of the assembled Kazakh reporters cast doubt on the impact of the
campaign in a country where western tobacco companies are battling for an
annual market of 20 billion cigarettes and are freer than in the more
health-conscious United States. ``Everyone knows that for children, seeing a
man smoking is the biggest attraction,'' said one local journalist.

``When will these cigarette advertisments be taken down?'' another wanted to
know, while a third asked why the campaign posters did not say explicitly
that smoking damaged health.

Duerst replied that the company was acting within the law and said bans on
advertising elsewhere had not stopped smoking Adil Akhmetov, head of the
ministry's education committee, said it was more up to the media to
highlight health dangers, as in the United States.

``Why doesn't our television deal with this?...We could also find a good
example of a famous man who died of cancer and show it on television,'' he
said, noting a U.S. television advert in which an actor dying of cancer
urged people not to smoke. ``It's not a matter for the firm, but for our
society. To get the company to do that is not right. It's a thing for you
and me to do, through education, television and the press.''