Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol, Big Food: The Industries Feeding a Global Health Disaster -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

The world has been treating noncommunicable diseases as a personal choice for decades. When people smoke, drink too much or eat rubbish the conventional wisdom is that it should be no surprise if they suffer. It’s a tale of personal accountability, moral clarity and easy political cowardice. It is also dangerously incomplete. Shaping the worldwide epidemic of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory illness and turning obesity into a global population level challenge requiring systemic solutions is something much more purposefully engineered than poor individual lifestyle choices: A transnational system of corporate political power that has profited by normalizing unhealthy consumption patterns to be desirable, addictive and coterminous with life itself.

The rise of the noncommunicable disease pandemic in modern times did not come from a vacuum. It was watered, Fed and grown.

Big Tobacco had long ago mastered the formula. Deny the science, market misinformation, prey on children and youth; jealously guard your immunity from regulation; monetize this new addiction by framing it as freedom. And so the tobacco industry was modernity’s bea­con for corporate damage control. But tobacco is not by itself anymore. Many of the same strategies have been adopted by pretty much everything else that’s ultra-processed, and they work surprisingly well in their favour. While cloaked in the language of consumer choice, they use enormous ad budgets, hard selling from product placement to celebrity endorsement and lobbying both political and digital all to influence that very choice.

The result is not a market of purchase decisions free from bad actors. It is a dependency factory.

This is important, because the noncommunicable disease burden has become one of the great public health failures of our time. Each of the products is, more or less widely available and heavily marketed and politically protected from measures to thin their numbers but they kill millions a year. Rising costs put strain on health channels. Families suffer devastating financial and emotional losses. Productivity collapses. Entire communities are forced to sink into cycles of avoidable disease. Still, as the evidence has mounted, governments usually respond with a timorousness that approaches complicity.

Why? Which means taking on the powerful industries selling us these harmful products, who know just how to defend themselves.

They do it by turning public health into a war zone. Documents released in relation to that effort showed stronger warning labels are “nanny state overreach.” Ad bans are turned into “attacks on free enterprise.” Job killing taxes on bad for you products become “burdens customers”. International trade rules are used as shields against domestic regulation. In the past, lobbyists blurred the lines of economic growth and corporate impunity. The products have not stopped flowing, nor the advertising ramping up while policymakers either dither or do nothing and diseases keep spreading.

Global law is the tipping point for this stuff. National goodwill alone cannot be expected to take on the problem of noncommunicable diseases state by fragment. What they need are robust legal frameworks that can withstand commercial pressure and extraterritorial manipulation. That international rules reshaped the regulatory terrain was demonstrated by The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. It also showed what the world does not have to take at face value from industry. It can limit, regulate, tax, expose and retaliate.

However, the wider battle still appears badly mismatched.

Neither is there a similarly zealous global regime for alcohol or ultra-processed food, despite expanding evidence of harm and aggressive transnational promotion. That gap is not accidental. It is a an indicator of the political successes industry has enjoyed since tobacco lost its most important legal and policy battles having adapted their strategies accordingly. The corporate playbook of today is more evolved, but the end game is largely unchanged: postpone regulation, water down liability and protect profit.

And herein lies the magic word: profit. These are not the industries that pretend to be in denial about how damaging their products can be. They just exist in a system that allows harm to be economically rational. The problem is no longer only consumption when disease becomes a predictable by product of revenue. It is a governance, law and ethics issue.

This is why the language of moderation and balance or even awareness campaigns are no longer sufficient. We can reeducate people, but education alone cannot overcome billion dollar marketing ecosystems designed to colonize the habits of 3 year olds for life. Public health does not fail because of some absence to data. It loses because information is pitted against industrial power.

The harsh reality is this: Most governments are still attempting to treat a structural crisis as though it were maritime disarmament. Here a warning, there a campaign, an industry-free zone for good measure; rinse and repeat ad nauseam. At the same time, corporations are continuing to peddle mass preventable disease and posing as partners in the solution.

They are not the solution. They are at the heart of it all.

This is not speculation; after all, but rather a sober observation: the world cannot curb NCDs if it clings to the comforting fiction that corporate self-regulation protects public health. It will not. What are needed is tougher law, stricter marketing constraints, stronger taxation, clearer labeling and trade rules that will not undermine health legislation — indeed truly international frameworks treating harmful industries as powers to be contained rather than partners to indulge.

Since the pandemic is not only about millions of people getting sick.

It is that the systems which could no longer resist it still act as if those who profit from disease are entitled to one last bargaining round before they go down.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia