Global tobacco industry’s systemic health sabotage: How colonial legacies and corporate power amplify COVID-19 risks for marginalised communities
Original framing: “WHO statement: Tobacco use and COVID-19” — WHO News
The voices of **tobacco farmers in Malawi**, who earn less than $1/day and are trapped in debt by seed monopolies, are entirely absent, as are **street vendors in Dhaka**, who sell cheap bidis to children despite knowing the health risks. Women in Global South supply chains—who make up 30% of tobacco workers but 50% of lung disease cases due to poor ventilation—are also invisible. The WHO’s framing reinforces this erasure by treating tobacco use as a *personal* rather than *structural* issue, ignoring how **privatised healthcare** in countries like India forces smokers to pay out-of-pocket for COVID-19 treatments they could have avoided with regulation. Marginalised voices, when heard, often describe tobacco as a ‘necessity’ in economies where wages are too low for alternatives.
The WHO’s statement, while scientifically accurate, operates within a **neoliberal health framework** that treats tobacco as an individual risk rather than a **corporate-engineered pandemic enabler**.
This framing obscures how **colonial trade legacies**, **austerity policies**, and **industry lobbying** have created the conditions for tobacco’s global harm, particularly in marginalised communities where alternatives are unaffordable. Indigenous knowledge systems—like the Haudenosaunee’s *Good Mind* movement—offer **structural alternatives**, but are erased in favour of biomedical solutions that ignore power. The **trickster’s gaze** reveals the hypocrisy: while the WHO warns of smoking’s dangers, the same institutions fail to challenge the **$8.1 billion annual tobacco industry lobbying machine** that funds ‘balanced’ journalism and blocks plain packaging laws. Solutions must therefore **disrupt this cycle** by centering **Indigenous sovereignty**, **corporate accountability**, and **artistic resistance**—not just individual behaviour change. The path forward lies in **reparative economics**, where tobacco profits fund transitions to regenerative agriculture and healthcare, and in **legal mechanisms** that hold corporations accountable for structural harm, as seen in the **Dutch Shell climate case**. Without this systemic shift, public health efforts will remain **band-aids on a colonial wound**.