World View : New ‘Opium War’ Cuts Across the Third World : The current struggle is over tobacco as Western firms eye growing markets abroad to replace shrinking demand at home. They face opposition from local growers, health advocates.

Across East Asia and through much of the developing world, a battle is raging that some are calling a new Opium War.

Britain’s victory in that 19th-Century conflict enabled its traders to continue exchanging Indian opium for Chinese tea and silk, making huge profits while devastating China.

Today’s fight is over tobacco. Western firms, faced with declining demand at home, are seeking to expand overseas. But they face fierce resistance from local tobacco industries, nationalist advocates of protective farm policies and outraged anti-smoking activists.

Lines are drawn for growing political conflict within and between nations. In the United States and Europe, those opposing the trade on health and ethical grounds are sharpening their attacks on tobacco defenders. Internationally, some tobacco disputes are escalating and more are waiting to erupt.

The new Tobacco Wars sometimes reveal sparks of humor, as when leaflets passed out at a rally outside the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, declared: “If smokers have to die, they should die with Thai tobacco.”

But the battles are mostly serious.

Approximately 500 million people alive today will die of tobacco-caused diseases, according to an estimate presented by Richard Peto, an Oxford University cancer expert, at an April conference on tobacco and health held in Australia.

The U.S. government, viewing tobacco sales as a trade issue, has weighed in on the side of the tobacco firms, using the threat of trade sanctions to force markets open in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

The Bush Administration is due to decide in November whether to impose punitive tariffs on Thailand for refusing to open its cigarette market to foreign brands. Before then, officials of the Geneva-based General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade will examine the issue.

The tobacco industry argues that it is only seeking fair access to existing markets, not creating new smokers overseas. Some also note that American and European cigarettes often have less tar than local brands common in developing countries.

But with each new inroad, opponents become more vocal. Opium War imagery adds power to their cause.

Taiwan’s anti-smoking activist David Yen, who lost a lung to cancer in 1972, has been compared to Lin Zexu, the Qing Dynasty official who led the anti-opium campaign that touched off that long-ago conflict with England.

In South Korea, where resistance to foreign cigarettes has strong nationalistic overtones, anti-imports leader Kang Moon Kyu told the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review that the key issue is protection of tobacco farmers, and “health is secondary.”

But Kang, too, reached back to the powerful old image. “This is Korea’s version of the Opium War,” he said.

People like Yen and Kang are finding increasingly vocal allies in the richer developed countries.

Tobacco companies are “marketing death in the Third World,” American Cancer Society chief executive William Tipping declared at the April health conference held in Perth, Australia.

“American corporations are the carriers of an epidemic, and our government has become a willing instrument for the enforced export of that epidemic,” Tipping said. “Those of us from America can only feel ashamed at our Administration’s role in undermining world health.”

U.S. tobacco exports are booming. American firms shipped nearly $5 billion worth of tobacco products overseas in 1989, according to a study released in April by the Tobacco Merchants Assn. of the United States.

At a health conference in Boston late last month, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called the rise in tobacco exports “a moral outrage.”

Koop noted that while smoking in the United States dropped 5% last year, U.S. tobacco exports rose 20%.

“I do not believe the United States will ever again be a good market for tobacco products,” Koop said. “The curve is going down and accelerating. But if we feel good because we have beaten the cigarette industry on its own turf, we must realize that we’ve driven them to scour the rest of the earth for new victims.”

The tobacco issue is also heating up in Europe.

London’s Sunday Times reported last month that thousands of tons of high-tar tobacco is being exported from European Community countries to developing nations at low, taxpayer-subsidized prices.

Such exports are expected to grow once a new ruling comes into effect at the end of 1992 banning the sale within the European Community of any cigarettes containing more than 15 milligrams of tar, the newspaper reported.

“It is totally unacceptable, and against all ethics, for the European Community to dump high-tar tobacco on the Third World,” Roberto Masironi, head of a World Health Organization program on tobacco and health, commented in the Sunday Times report. Keith Ball, a chest surgeon and adviser to the World Health Organization, told the Sunday Times that today’s European tobacco exports, much of which go to Africa, will eventually bring sharply increased cancer rates there. “We have lit the fuse,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the explosion.”

Those who focus not on health issues but on tobacco’s contribution to exporting countries’ balance of payments often take a very different view.

A U.S. tobacco industry lobbying group called COMET (Coalition for Open Markets and Expanded Trade) recently noted that “in the face of the chronic American foreign trade deficit, the U.S. tobacco export industry has steadily increased its foreign trade surplus, ending 1989 with a net surplus of $4.3 billion.”

Despite this growing trade surplus, U.S. cigarette exports account for less than 3% of worldwide consumption, according to COMET.

In an April statement on tobacco exports, Dean Kleckner, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, praised the growth in overseas sales as benefiting American farmers and the U.S. economy. “The success of tobacco has meant thousands of jobs in this country and has provided many farm families a good income.”

The Bush Administration says it respects health restrictions that foreign governments place on smoking and cigarette sales, but that when a country allows domestic firms to sell cigarettes, foreign producers should have the same opportunity.

The United States, however, sometimes has attacked other countries’ restrictions on cigarette advertising, further angering anti-smoking forces. Tobacco industry officials and Administration policy-makers argue that, because imports have long been shut out, American cigarette makers must advertise in these countries to let people know their products are available.

Anti-smoking activists in developing nations usually view such advertising as anathema.

In Latin America, tobacco advertising “is everywhere, at all times--theaters, opera houses, many sporting events, popular concerts,” Carlos Alvarez Herrera, president of the Argentina-based Latin America Coordinating Council on Smoking Control, complained at the recent Boston conference.

Some, however, believe that by introducing a nationalistic element to the tobacco issue, Western firms are provoking developing countries to look more seriously at the question of tobacco and health.

“The Western blitzkrieg . . . seems to have backfired,” reported Asiaweek, a Hong Kong-based magazine. “Asian opinion seems to have tipped toward seeing a commercial dispute as an issue of public health.”

U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills, sticking to the view that this is still a commercial dispute, recently defended the American stance this way: “In a situation in which a foreign government judges it acceptable to sell cigarettes to its citizens, we see no basis for refraining from ensuring equal access for U.S. cigarette manufacturers. The sale of cigarettes is legal in the United States and legal in those markets in which we have challenged their practices.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), speaking at the recent health conference in Boston, ridiculed Hills’ stance. “Carla Hills is supposed to be the U.S. trade representative,” he declared, “not the U.S. cancer representative.”

The General Accounting Office, Congress’ own watchdog agency, issued a mid-May report noting that American health and trade policies appear to be in conflict. The report noted that “if Congress believes that health considerations should have primacy,” it has the option of enacting laws to bring that about. So far, one such bill has been introduced.

Meanwhile, tobacco companies continue to develop markets even in countries where U.S. pressure is not yet a major issue.

Philip Morris Asia Inc., for example, recently sponsored a Beijing exhibit of its Formula One racing cars. A few days later, sports officials and a Philip Morris representative appeared at a news conference in the Great Hall of the People to announce the Marlboro Dynasty Cup soccer tournament, which will bring together teams from North Korea, South Korea, China and Japan in Beijing this summer.

A reporter at the news conference asked for a response to criticism in the United States and elsewhere that, since cigarettes are not good for health, companies should not try to develop new markets in Asia.

Cathy Leiber, Hong Kong-based marketing coordinator for Philip Morris, replied that Marlboro helps “put sports on the map in countries that otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to compete at this level.”

“In terms of our visibility as a company,” she added, “we take great pride in the knowledge that we market a legal product around the world.”

Organizations such as the London-based International Tobacco Growers Assn. are also fighting back.

“Evidence from a number of major authoritative studies has emphasized the economic and social importance of tobacco growing for many developing countries,” Alan F. Ravenscroft, chairman of the growers association, wrote in an association report on tobacco in the Third World.

“Yet anti-tobacco policies are being designed to reduce and even eliminate the use of tobacco by the year 2000,” Ravenscroft continued. “Little allowance appears to have been made for the very significant losses in jobs, foreign-exchange earnings and revenue that would result if these policies were ever implemented. As a consequence of these losses, many developing countries would face serious problems of social instability and economic ruin.”

The report estimates that 33 million people engage in tobacco growing worldwide, 90% of them in the developing countries. Including their families, about 100 million people derive their livelihoods from tobacco cultivation, the study says.

The world’s leading tobacco grower is China, which produced 2.9 million tons in 1989, about 40% of the world total. This is slightly more than four times the production of the United States, which ranks No. 2.

Market penetration by foreign brands remains at just 1% in China, which still severely restricts cigarette imports.

The tobacco issue in China may ultimately be of greater significance than in any other country. Most Chinese men are heavy smokers. Offering cigarettes is an important social ritual, and few people take the risk of cancer very seriously.

The Chinese government has recently given some support to anti-smoking efforts, and the Chinese media are beginning to be aware of the issue.

A recent report by the official New China News Agency quoted World Health Organization figures showing that tobacco-related diseases now take about 2.7 million lives per year worldwide.

“Predictions for the future are grim,” it added. “Of all the children alive today in China under 20 years of age, it is estimated that 50 million will die from the effects of tobacco use.”

The news agency reported last month that survey results show 37% of high school boys and just 2% of high school girls in China are smokers. The report added, without giving details, that China is drafting laws “to control the dangers of tobacco.”

No-smoking signs are beginning to appear in airport departure lounges and on some trains. But they are often disregarded. Virtually no one in China has any concept of personal rights to clean air.

“In America, you cannot smoke anywhere--not at work, not in airplanes, not in restaurants,” marveled an elderly Chinese man who recently visited relatives in the United States. “In China, you can smoke everywhere, even if there’s a law against it. That’s why all the American tobacco companies have started to sell in China. They can make more money here. You can’t smoke American cigarettes in America, but you can in China!”

The 10 Leading Tobacco Producers

Estimated 1989 green weight production in tons 1. China: 2,886,150 2. United States: 698,400 3. India: 445,150 4. Brazil: 440,000 5. Soviet Union: 242,000 6. Turkey: 186,100 7. Italy: 177,000 8. Indonesia: 155,500 9. Greece: 150,300 10. Zimbabwe: 132,500

Source: International Tobacco Growers’ Association

Times staff writers Art Pine in Washington and William R. Long in Rio de Janeiro, and Times researcher Nick Driver in Beijing contributed to this report.