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Cigarette Makers See Future (It’s in Asia) —By Philip S

admin2010-07-14  46
问题                     Cigarette Makers See Future (It’s in Asia)
                                                                         —By Philip Shenon
                                                                      New York Times Service
    The Marlboro Man has found greener pastures.
    The cigarette-hawking (兜售香烟的) cowboy may be under siege back home in the United States from lawmakers and health advocates determined to put him out of business, but half a world away, in Asia, he is prospering, his craggy (毛糙的) all-American mug slapped up on billboards and flickering across television screens.
    And Marlboro cigarettes have never been more popular on the continent that is home to 60 percent of the world’s population.
    For the world’s cigarette-makers, Asia is the future. And it is probably their savior.
    Industry critics who hope that the multinational tobacco companies are headed for extinction owe themselves a stroll down the tobacco-scented streets of almost any city in Asia.
    Almost everywhere here the air is thick with the swirling gray haze of cigarette smoke, the evidence of a booming Asian growth market that promises vast profits for the tobacco industry and a death toll measured in the tens of millions.
    At lunchtime in Seoul, throngs of fashionably dressed young Korean women gather in a fast-food restaurant to enjoy a last cigarette before returning to work, a scene that draws distressed stares from older Koreans who re member a time when it would have been scandalous for women from respectable homes to smoke.
    In Hong Kong, China, shoppers flock into the Salem Attitudes boutique (时装商店), picking from among the racks of trendy sports clothes stamped with the logo of Salem cigarettes.
    In Phnom Penh(金边), the war-shattered capital of Cambodia, visitors leaving an audience with King Sihanouk are greeted with a giant billboard planted right across the street from his ornate (装饰华丽的) gold-roofed pal ace. It advertises Lucky Strikes.
    According to tobacco industry projections cited by the World Health Organization, the Asian cigarette market should grow by more than a third during the 1990s, with much of the bounty going to multinational tobacco giants eager for an alternative to the shrinking market in the United States.
    American cigarette sales are expected to decline by about 15 percent by the end of the decade, a reflection of the move to ban public smoking in most of the United States. Sales in Western Europe and other industrialized countries are also expected to drop.
    But no matter how bad the news is in the West, the tobacco companies can find comfort in Asia and throughout the Third World, markets so huge and so promising that they make the once all-important American market seem insignificant. Beyond Asia, cigarette consumption is also expected to grow in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and in the nations of the former Soviet Union.
    Status appears to matter far more than taste. "There is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that smokers can taste any difference between the more
expensive foreign brands and the indigenous (本地产的) cigarettes," said Simon Chapman, a specialist in community medicine at the University of Sydney. "The difference appears to be in the packaging, the advertising."
    He said that researchers had been unable to determine whether the foreign tobacco companies had adjusted the levels of tar, nicotine and other chemicals for cigarettes sold in the Asian market. "The tobacco industry fights tooth and nail to keep consumers away from that kind of information," he said.
    Most governments in Asia have launched anti-smoking campaigns, but their efforts tend to be overwhelmed by the Madison Avenue glitz (浮华) un leashed by the cigarette giants.
    With 1.2 billion people and the world’s fastest-growing economy, China is the most coveted (极想得到的)target of the multinational tobacco companies.
    Cigarette consumption, calculated as the number of cigarettes smoked per adult, has increased by 7 percent each year over the last decade in China. There are 300 million smokers in China, more people than the entire population of the United States, and they buy 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year.
    Competing in many cases with domestically produced brands, the multi national tobacco companies are moving quickly to get their cigarettes into China and emerging markets in the rest of the developing world. Their campaign has been bolstered (支撑) by the efforts of American government trade negotiators to force open tobacco markets overseas.
    Since the mid-1980s, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand have all succumbed (屈从) to pressure from Washington and allowed the sale of foreign brand cigarettes. Foreign cigarettes, shut out of Japan in 1980, now make up nearly 20 percent of the market.
    "Worldwide, hundreds of millions of smokers prefer American-blend cigarettes,’’ James W. Johnston, chairman of Reynolds Tobacco Worldwide, wrote in his company’s 1993 annual report. "Today, Reynolds has access to 90 percent of the world’s markets; a decade ago, only 40 percent. Opportunities have never been better."
    Last year, Philip Morris, the company behind the Marlboro Man, signed an agreement with the government controlled China National Tobacco Corp. to make Marlboros and other Philip Morris brands in China. The company’s foreign markets grew last year by more than 16 percent, with foreign operating profits up nearly 17 percent. Operating profits in the domestic American market fell by nearly half.
    Physicians say the health implications of the tobacco boom in Asia are nothing less than terrifying.
    Richard Peto, an Oxford University epidemiologist (流行病学家), has estimated that because of increasing tobacco consumption in Asia, the annual worldwide death toll from tobacco-related illnesses will more than triple over the next two decades, from about 3 million a year to 10 million a year, a fifth of them in China. His calculations suggest that 50 million Chinese children alive today will eventually die from diseases linked to cigarette smoking.
    "If you look at the number of deaths, the tobacco problem in Asia is going to dwarf tuberculosis, it’s going to dwarf malaria and it’s going to dwarf AIDS, yet it’s being totally ignored," said Judith Mackay, a British physician who is a consultant to the Chinese government in developing an anti-smoking program.
    The explosion of the Asian tobacco market is a result both of the increasing prosperity of large Asian nations—suddenly, tens of millions of Asians can afford cigarettes, once a luxury—and a shift in social customs. In many Asian countries, smoking was once taboo for women. Now, it is seen as a sign of their emancipation.
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