What's wrong with donating one million pesos to typhoon victims, donating a new school building or hospital, helping paint classrooms, planting trees, and providing ambulances? Technically, nothing. These are good works that benefit people. But what if we were to dig deeper and discover that the doer of all this good was a tobacco company? That changes everything.
How can a company that makes, promotes, and sells a product that causes so much disease, suffering, and death, think that by giving away a few million pesos at a time, it can make up for its products' many harms or "buy back" the lives and quality of life that it destroyed? I'm sorry: hindi nabibili ang buhay ng tao.
At the same time that it is donating a few million pesos from its billions in annual profits (and wantonly promoting its "charitable work"), it fights tobacco tax increases that can raise many more billions for the government. Idiots! We don't want your loose change. Without complaining, let the government raise taxes high enough so that there is enough government revenue to fund health, education, and other social programs, while making cigarettes less affordable to our youth and the poor who cannot afford to get sick with a tobacco-related disease.
These gestures of charity and apparent responsibility are ultimately geared towards improving the tarnished reputations of tobacco companies, buying social acceptability, and neutralizing the industry's opposition from the public health community. Tobacco companies will do anything (yes, anything) to make a profit and please their shareholders, including lying, cheating, and threatening to sue ministries of health.
If a tobacco company was really sincere about being socially responsible, it would:
- stop fighting effective tobacco tax increases
- tell the truth about tobacco harms by printing pictorial health warnings
- stop all advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, especially for activities aimed at young people
- stop denying the harms of second-hand smoke and fighting bans on smoking in public places
- stop making and selling tobacco products and shift to a different product
If you're interested, here's a good report on the truth behind BAT New Zealand's CSR:
http://www.oxygeneve.ch/docs/bat-nz-trust-us-we're-socially-responsible.pdf
Also see "Trust Us, we're the tobacco industry":
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/campaign/global/framework/docs/TrustUs.pdf
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