‘Manage and mitigate punitive regulatory measures, enhance the corporate image, influence public policy’: industry efforts to shape understanding of tobacco-attributable deforestation

BACKGROUND: Deforestation due to tobacco farming began to raise concerns in the mid 1970s. Over the next 40 years, tobacco growing increased significantly and shifted markedly to low- and middle-income countries. The percentage of deforestation caused by tobacco farming reached 4 % globally by the early 2000s, although substantially higher in countries such as China (18 %), Zimbabwe (20 %), Malawi (26 %) and Bangladesh (>30 %). Transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) have argued that tobacco-attributable deforestation is not a serious problem, and that the industry has addressed the issue through corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. METHODS: After reviewing the existing scholarly literature on tobacco and deforestation, we analysed industry sources of public information to understand how the industry framed deforestation,…