Dear Colleagues and friends
Please find below an open letter to Walter Ammann and the Global Risk Forum, calling for him to withdraw from the sponsorship arrangement with Japan Tobacco International Foundation.
If you share my strong views on this, I hope that you can make them known to him at
[log in to unmask]
and forward the message to your relevant networks.
Apologies for any cross-postings.
good wishes
Terry Cannon
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To Walter Ammann
Global Risk Forum, Davos, Switzerland.
An Open Letter concerning the sponsorship by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) foundation
Dear Walter
I write in regard to the sponsorship you have accepted for research awards at the Forum this year, given by JTI.
http://idrc.info/pages_new.php/JTI-Foundation-Resilience-Award/891/1/
As you well know, this is the "philanthropic" arm of a very large tobacco company. They market Benson & Hedges, Camel and Winston among other well-known brands. They also boast over 200 "corporate philanthropy projects" around the world, which are of course designed to buy favour and good public relations while their products kill people.
http://www.jti.com/our-company/facts-and-figures/what/
They are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Tobacco causes the premature deaths of many more people in the world than all natural hazard disasters put together. The WHO estimate more than 5 million premature deaths from smoking every year. This is an order of magnitude higher than mortality from natural hazards in even the worst years for disasters.
So the JTI wants to suggest it is happy to save a few deaths from hazards, while contributing to millions of smoking deaths. Given that JTI has about 10% of the global market, this means they kill around half a million people each year. How many research grants to save lives in disasters would be needed to match that?
From Reuters Alert website: "WHO director general Margaret Chan .... added, however, that the battle was far from over and urged more countries to fight the industry. "We must never allow the tobacco industry to get the upper hand," she said in a foreword to the report. "Tobacco is a killer. It should not be advertised, subsidized or glamorized."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/21/us-tobacco-global-deaths-idUSBRE82K0C020120321
Ironically, you also host the One Health Summit in Davos....
JTI has located its global HQ in Geneva and presumably their sponsorship of the disasters conference awards in Davos (also in Switzerland) is good public relations with the Swiss government. Shockingly, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement has also accepted their sponsorship to revamp the Red Cross museum in Geneva....
I call on you and the GRF to pull out of this sordid relationship and get down to a proper understanding of the relationship between corporate sponsorship and the buying of respectability.
yours sincerely
Terry Cannon
Institute of Development Studies, UK
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