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Tobacco industry accused of corrupting ideals of corporate social responsibility

November 28, 2002

Two leading tobacco policy experts have today accused transnational tobacco companies of corrupting the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by seeking to use it as a means of directing attention away from the deadly effects of their products and dubious business practices.

Jeff Collin, a Lecturer with the Centre on Global Change and Health, and Anna B Gilmore, a Research Fellow with the European Centre on the Health of Societies in Transition (ECOHOST), are both based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In the journal Global Social Policy, they accuse the tobacco industry of cynically exploiting CSR as a 'fashionable method of regaining legitimacy among shareholders, policy-makers and the public'.

British American Tobacco (BAT), the most international tobacco group with the second largest market share of the global market, is one of a number of tobacco companies, including Imperial Tobacco, Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson, keen to demonstrate its ethical credentials. In December 2000, amid much controversy, BAT announced a £3.8 million donation to create an International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility at the University of Nottingham. This was followed earlier this year by the publication of BAT's first annual report to society which, although pilloried by public health groups, was warmly received by FTSE4Good, an organisation tracking the performance of socially responsible equities. BAT has subsequently become the first tobacco company to be included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes.

But Collin and Gilmore accuse the company of abusing CSR by adopting it as a smokescreen to detract attention from both the global health impact of its products and broad evidence of malpractice, particularly in developing countries. BAT's Social Report is an attempt to regain legitimacy by a company that has become mired in allegations of smuggling, price fixing, collusion with the dictatorship in Burma an exploitation of farmers in Brazil and Uzbekistan.

The authors describe how the BAT Social Report does not list those invited to stakeholder meetings, and how meetings were conducted under Chatham House rules in which participants were not permitted to reveal discussions to outsiders or make any details public. It also details how many of the measures highlighted in the report which allegedly tackle the health problems associated with smoking actually serve to exacerbate them. The company's advocacy of an increase in the legal minimum age for sales of cigarettes from 16 to 18, for example, is widely viewed by tobacco control advocates as being at best ineffective and probably harmful, reinforcing the message that smoking is an adult activity and thus heightening its appeal to teenagers.

The authors say: 'The central idea behind CSR is that corporations should work to improve their environmental and social impacts, with an emphasis on voluntarily developing practices that exceed standards required for legal compliance,' say the authors. 'The tobacco companies would argue that as long as it is legal to make cigarettes, then surely it is right to recognise any steps the tobacco industry is taking to act more responsibly. But the tobacco industry is cynically highlighting carefully selected examples of philanthropy and good practice in an attempt to defuse pressure from the effective control measures that would promote global health and so jeopardise the industry's future profits.

'We believe that it is extremely difficult to reconcile proclaimed social responsibility with the manufacture of products which kill around half of their consumers and which will, according to WHO, account for ten million deaths worldwide each year by 2030.

'The ongoing practices of tobacco companies in developing countries confirm that their discovery of CSR is merely an attempt to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the public and with the financial markets; it does not indicate any significant change in the appalling way they do business.

'Tobacco companies are being allowed to hijack CSR, and the commendable ideals behind the concept will lose their legitimacy and the support of the public ', comments Jeff Collin. 'CSR should not be used as a 'greenwash', or a public relations opportunity by disreputable corporations seeking to appear respectable while peddling death and disease to millions'.

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)