The tobacco industry is compromising efforts to curb of tobacco use in the country, said Malaysia Association of Environmental Health representative Veeramoham Supramaniam.

He was speaking at the Malaysian Conference on Tobacco Control today, which was organised by the Malaysian Council of Tobacco Control and the Ministry of Health to discuss matters pertaining to Malaysia's compliance with the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

In his lecture titled 'Optimising Law Enforcement Towards Tobacco Control', Veeramohan said tobacco-giants were actively seeking ways to be part of tobacco regulatory development.

For example, he showed the audience of government officials, NGOs and individuals an abstract of British American Tobacco's 2004-2005 social report, which said that the company 'can work together' with the government in this aspect.

"This shows that they have infiltrated the federal agencies," said Veeramohan ( left ).

Political will lacking

Another deterrent to tobacco control, said Veeramohan, was the powers given to the health minister to circumvent the Organisational Safety and Health Act 1994, by exempting certain indoor areas from the smoking prohibitions.

Regulation 11 of the Control of Tobacco Products Regulation 1994, which comes under the Food Act 1983, states that all entertainment venues, with the exception of casino, pub, discotheque or nightclub, were smoking prohibited.

Another speaker, lawyer and former parliamentarian Wee Choo Keong ( left ) said the shortcomings in tobacco control boiled down to a matter of political will by the government.

One of the gravest examples, said Wee, was the government's decision to extend the exemption on the sponsorship by tobacco companies in the annual Formula One event to 2007, after the initial December 2005 deadline expired.

The lack of political will also adversely affected the level of enforcement on tobacco control, said Wee, adding that tobacco industries had knowingly been flouting the law in the new marketing exercises.

Pointing towards Singapore's as an example, he said strict enforcement on business license had resulted in compliance from tobacco industry players and business owners in self-regulating smoking prohibited areas.

"Cessation of business is what they fear," added Wee.

Empower local authorities

Veeramohan also proposed that local authorities should be given wider powers to play a role in tobacco control, such as the smoking prohibition clause as a business licensing condition.

He added that local authorities can act as a 'one-stop licensing and enforcement centres' since their jurisdiction overlaps with other government agencies who are enforcing smoking prohibitions.

The FCTC was one of the most rapidly endorsed United Nations treaty of all time. Among other methods, the treaty seeks to ban tobacco advertising and force cigarette makers to increase size of health warnings to take up at least 30 percent of package cover.

While Malaysia became a party to the treaty in September 2005, Russia and the United States of America had yet to ratify the treaty according to the WHO website .

The National Health and Morbidity Survey in 1996 estimated that 25 percent of the population were smokers.

Studies have shown that annual health care cost from smoking is equivalent to 0.1 to 1.1 percent of the nation's gross-domestic product (GDP) consumers between six to 15 percent of total national health care cost.