In March this year, Indonesia won the right to seek a ruling by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Australia's tobacco plain-packaging laws. The WTO's disputes settlement body agreed to set up an independent panel of trade and legal experts in order to assess whether Australia was breaching the rules of global commerce.
On 5 May, the Director-General of the WTO appointed panelists to examine the complaints made against Australia's plain packaging laws, which by then included Ukraine, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Indonesia.
On 14 October, the WTO announced that it will not rule on the legal challenge to Australia's tobacco packaging laws until at least the first half of 2016.
Both supporters and opponents claim that such restrictions could spread to alcohol and some foods with high sugar or fat content, so the WTO case is far more wide-reaching than Australia's own tobacco policies. Some countries around the world are waiting for the outcome of the case before deciding to adopt similar restrictions on tobacco packaging. Others have begun legislating.
Even if the panel’s decision is announced in early in 2016, the result can be appealed by either side, delaying the final outcome possibly until 2017.
Amanda Sandford, information manager at ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), commented, “There is no need for countries to wait for the WTO ruling. As we have seen in Australia, there is strong evidence on public health grounds to support standardised tobacco packaging. Furthermore, the independent review by Sir Cyril Chantler found no evidence to support the tobacco industry’s argument that the measure would increase the illicit market. A number of countries including Ireland, New Zealand and France, in addition to the UK, are pressing ahead with plans to introduce standardised packaging and we would urge other countries to follow suit.”
The UK packaging industry stated, however, that there is now a clear cut case to delay any further plans to increase packaging regulation including plain packaging in the UK and across the EU in total.
Mike Ridgway, director of the Consumer Packaging Manufactures Association (CPMA), commented that the UK Government should now suspend all decisions on plain packaging with the risk of large scale consequential fines and compensation payments by a WTO decision being faced by future taxpayers. Any premature decision would also encourage further regulation in other sectors with an adverse affect on the packaging industry, he added.
Meanwhile in Australia on October 17, the Cancer Institute of NSW released the state's first comprehensive report on lung cancer. It shows that lung cancer is the number one killer among cancers, and that a surge in the take-up of smoking among women in the early 1980s is now being echoed in lung cancer rates, which are rising for women while falling for men.
Tobacco consumption in NSW has dramatically decreased since the 1970s, when 70% of the adult population smoked, chief cancer officer and Cancer Institute chief executive, David Currow, noted. But while the smoking rate among men has been decreasing since 1984, women continued to adopt the habit. In fact, the number of women taking up smoking grew for several more years. This is now being manifested in lung cancer rates, which have fallen by 38% over 25 years for men and have increased by 84% for women over the same period.