The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

The presentation reviewed existing literature, reports/monographs and industry documents on product development initiatives within the African context. Tobacco products used in Africa, other than manufactured cigarettes, include mainly snuff and to a lesser extent, roll-your-own cigarettes, native pipe and water-pipe smoking. Traditional snuff remains the dominant form of nicotine-delivery used by Sudanese adult males (40%) and indigenous South African women (13.2%). With increase in prices of manufactured cigarettes, there is now a considerable amount of smokers who use roll-your-own cigarettes made with air-cured- or pipe-tobaccos rolled in Newspapers. These other tobacco products - mainly smokeless tobacco - also appear to be appealing to adolescents e.g. in Ghana (14.5%), Uganda (10%), Malawi (12.8%) and South Africa (13.5%). Nevertheless, the industry continues to derive increasing profits from relatively low volume sales of manufactured cigarettes in the African region. Industry documents suggest efforts were directed at providing maximum nicotine deliveries or ‘satisfaction' per cigarette in response to the single-stick purchase habits of Africans and in contrast to much lower yield initiatives pursued in the developed nations. To the extent that industry documents indicated that it ‘took advantage' of the fact that smoke deliveries (tar and nicotine) from laboratories located in African states at high altitudes (Kenya and South Africa) measured 16-20% lower than at sea-level, future emission measurement protocols should also take cognisance of the influence of location-specific conditions. With increasing entry of the industry into other tobacco products' market, opportunities for regulation are identified within the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control.