Smoking and Women
Published on March 17, 2009 5:01 AM
In every country the smokers’ number differs. For example around 229 million males in India consume tobacco. But from all countries where are smokers, only China has more male smokers, 331 million.
In India and China together, over half a billion men consume cigarettes. According to mathematical models, in Bangladesh alone, if the average household bought food with the money normally spent on tobacco, more than 10 million people would no longer suffer from malnutrition and 350 children under age five could be saved each day.
Cigarette smoking was rare among women in the early 20th century but then in the next century it became more prevalent among women than among men. According to a recent study, over 11 million Indian women use tobacco while 5 million smoke cigarettes or bidis and 6 million others chew it. That’s why female smokers in India die an average of eight years earlier than their non-smoking peers.
India is also the third leading producer of leaf tobacco, after China and Brazil. Over one lakh hectares of land is devoted to growing tobacco. Tobacco even replaces potential food production on almost 4 million hectares of the world's agricultural land, equal to all of the world's orange groves or banana plantations, the scientists said.
If India will continue to produce so many cigarettes then in 2010, tobacco will kill 6 million people annually, more than 80% of which will happen in low- and middle-resource countries like India.
These early deaths will drain $500 billion from the global economy each year as a result of lost productivity, misused resources, ineffective taxation and premature death.
Tobacco is grown in 120 countries, but 67% originates in China, Brazil, India or the US.
