Article Text
News analysis
How to make the US State Department’s tobacco directive work for you: Senegal’s case
Statistics from Altmetric.com
It is laudable that the State Department issued a directive on American international policy on tobacco in February 1998. At the same time it represents no real change in policy.
Old fair trade rhetoric and a new pro-health agenda aren’t easily squared, as the directive clearly indicates. Wrought with the old misguided logic of the “legal” product, its policy objective of ensuring American companies “equal access to a shrinking global market for tobacco” echoes the old USTR (United States trade representative) mentality: “We know cigarettes are bad, but hey, we’ve got to help ‘poor’ American companies get their ‘fair’ share of the pie!” This ignores the fact that …