http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7475259.stm
Made me think can we really trust the big tobacco companies? :O
Made me think can we really trust the big tobacco companies? :O
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Nevermind just tobacco companies - most big corporations are visciously screwing developing countries one way or another. That's the name of the rat race, it would seem. Until education, fiscal independence, progressive government, and a whole slew of other things are sorted out, there's not much you can do to stop them. So long as people continue to buy the stuff, someone will continue to sell it - and market it to the best of their ability. If history teaches us anything, though, it's that stuff like this will change, slowly, with time, just as it did in the western world. It's taken decades, centuries even, for our modern society to come into the form that it is, and so much of that society is so deeply intertwined and interdependent that it's hard to look at Africa and make comparisons - the mechanisms and tools we, as a society, use to combat things like this are scarce in Africa. It's only when you start thinking of what you would need to do to stop it all that it starts to become clear that Africa is missing some critical social and political infrastructure to get the job done. I think it will improve, but not overnight. -
Well said Zero, there is a lot of truth in it. However,...
The sales of single cigarettes is completely normal in the poorer african countries. I was a lot in Guinea, West Africa and I was the ONLY person I knew who bought whole packages of cigarettes. All others (not kids) only could affort to buy one or two cigarettes. In front of the house, where I lived, there was woman standing on the street, selling single cigarettes. When I bought a whole package from her, she closed her little shop for the day because she had sold all what she had in stock and made her profit for the day! Her income was made by selling one package a day and with this she fed her kids. So, for us it sounds ridiculous to sell or buy single cigarettes but there it was something normal. Ah, and by the way, when I've bought a package it didn't last very long, as I had to share it with everybody I knew. Maybe that was another reason why nobody else bought packages
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