Belgium: British American Tobacco opposes the adoption of plain packaging

In September 2019, the British American Tobacco group, number two in the tobacco sector in Belgium, decided to challenge two royal decrees before the Council of State.[1] providing respectively for the adoption of plain packaging and the standardization of packaging units. These measures came into force on January 1, 2020.

An anti-smoking measure which, according to the company, would not slow down tobacco consumption in the flat country.

Since the new year, the introduction of plain packaging has applied to cigarettes, rolling tobacco, and shisha tobacco, as well as related tobacco products such as paper, tubes, and filters. The goal is to make tobacco packaging less appealing. The main challenge is to limit the appeal of tobacco products—and especially new products—to the younger generation.

In challenging this decision, the cigarette group believes that it is an unjustified measure in light of its objective, as it would have no effect on consumption and would not discourage consumers from making purchasing decisions. Furthermore, the company also points out that this decision should have been made through a law and not through a decree.

Belgium, at the top of the ranking of good students in the fight against tobacco

In Europe, Belgium is the fifth country to implement this anti-smoking measure, after France and the United Kingdom in 2017, Norway and Ireland in 2018. For information, daily smokers represented 15% of the Belgian population in 2018[2], a rate considered relatively low compared to the European average. Even more striking, the daily smoking prevalence in Belgium fell by 40% between 1997 and 2018. Suffice it to say that Belgium holds the recipe for effective smoking reduction and that the decision to use plain packaging is not as ill-considered as BAT would like to make it out to be.