World No Tobacco Day 2023: The Conversation Africa Actually Needs

LAGOS, NIGERIA — The World Health Organization has chosen "Grow food, not tobacco" as the theme of World No Tobacco Day 2023. The Foundation for Consumer Freedom Advancement (FCFA) is using the day to make a different point, one that has been missing from the global tobacco conversation for too long. The African adults who already smoke deserve a less harmful product to switch to, and the African farmers who have spent generations building expertise in their crop choices deserve to make those choices for themselves.

Neither of those positions is well represented by a slogan that tells farmers what to grow.

The Population the WHO Theme Skips

There are tens of millions of adult smokers across Africa. Many of them have tried to quit. Many of them have not succeeded. The standard public health response, focused on cessation and abstinence, has reduced smoking prevalence in some African countries, and it deserves credit for that progress. It has also left a substantial population of long-term smokers, particularly those who have been smoking for decades, with no realistic pathway to a reduced-harm outcome.

That population is who tobacco harm reduction policy is for. Africa's smokers are not a footnote in the global tobacco conversation. They are millions of adults who deserve the same access to safer alternatives that smokers in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan, and New Zealand have used to reduce their risk. Sweden has reached the lowest tobacco-related mortality rate in Europe and is now on track to officially become the first smoke-free country in the world. The country reached that outcome by allowing adult smokers to switch to safer products under proper regulation, not by banning the alternatives and not by lecturing farmers.

What's Wrong with "Grow Food, Not Tobacco"

FCFA does not endorse the framing of the 2023 theme. Telling African farmers what to plant is not the role of a global health agency, and it is not the role of any organisation that takes consumer and producer freedom seriously. Farmers are economic actors making decisions in markets they understand better than the institutions issuing slogans. A farmer who chooses tobacco does so because the market for tobacco offers something the alternatives do not: predictable pricing, established buyers, working logistics, or a return that supports a household.

If those conditions change, farmers will change their crops. They have done it many times before, in response to actual market signals rather than campaign messaging. What farmers need from policy is not direction. It is the basic infrastructure of choice: stable land tenure, working roads to market, access to credit, transparent pricing, and the freedom to make the decisions their own livelihoods depend on.

A theme that starts by telling them what to grow has the wrong starting point.

Where Africa Is Heading

Several African governments are now considering frameworks that would either restrict or outright ban reduced-risk products like e-cigarettes, oral nicotine pouches, and heated tobacco products. The justification, in nearly every case, is the protection of children and the prevention of new nicotine addiction. Those are legitimate concerns and FCFA supports the policy responses targeted at them, including age verification, marketing restrictions, and product standards.

The instruments being chosen, however, often go beyond child protection. Banning the safer alternatives outright leaves combustible cigarettes as the only legal option for the adults who already smoke. That is the wrong direction for African public health, the wrong direction for African consumer rights, and the wrong direction for any country that is serious about reducing the harm done by smoking in the next generation.

The Conversation FCFA Wants

For FCFA, World No Tobacco Day should be a day to ask the questions that move policy forward rather than restate the slogans of previous decades. Are African adult smokers being given access to less harmful products. Are African children being protected through measures designed for them, rather than measures that punish their parents. Are African farmers being respected as decision-makers in their own lives. Are African consumers being treated as adults capable of making informed choices.

Those are the questions worth a day on the calendar. The Foundation for Consumer Freedom Advancement will keep asking them.