On the afternoon of February 4th, a curious mix of audience was lining up at the sea-kissed Dome theatre of Mumbai’s NSCI to attend a particular session at the 8th Edition of TEDx Gateway. The speaker was Australia-based Radiation Oncologist Dr Bronwyn King.
The audience was an interesting medley because it had representatives from India’s top financial institutions, insurance firms, banks, corporates and media houses, and not just the medical fraternity or people affected by cancer, as one would generally expect.
The curiosity among the audience to hear out Dr. King was not unfounded as the subject of her talk was something that had attained huge consequences for the entire financial economy globally. Dr. King is the Founder and CEO of Tobacco Free Portfolios (a Not-For-Profit organization) and is an internationally renowned crusader against financial sector investments in tobacco companies.
Her speech at the TedX Gateway, thus, would also center around enlightening the representatives from corporate and financial sectors in India about how essential it was for them to eliminate tobacco from their investment portfolios and adopt policies to end all any commercial engagement with tobacco manufacturing companies.
Dr. King’s message to the Indian financial sector was an extension of what has been a global mission for her organization — Tobacco Free Portfolios — since the past six years. The organization has been professionally engaging with the global finance sector to encourage tobacco-free investments and playing a unique role in enabling the finance sector to align with governments, the health sector and the non-government community.
Tobacco Free Portfolios has been hugely successful in leading dozens of major financial institutions to reconsider commercial relationships with the tobacco industry and implement tobacco-free investment policies, enabling a whopping sum of US $10 billion to shift away from tobacco investments worldwide in the past two years alone.
Speaking to Business India at the sidelines of the TEDx Gateway, Dr. Bronwyn said: “The current status quo in the global finance sector is that most pension funds, most banks and most insurers invest money in tobacco companies. That goes for both public and private financial institutions – it’s the whole system. We must ask finance leaders to reconsider tobacco – this time through a health lens, and think about the impact of putting huge sums of money behind companies that make products that cause 7 million deaths every year.”
Dr. King’s Global achievements
Since 2012, Tobacco Free Portfolios has played an integral role in implementation of tobacco-free policies made by leading financial institutions across 11 countries, says Dr. King.
World’s largest insurers, major banks, fund managers, leading sovereign funds and pension funds have implemented tobacco-free investment mandates assisted by her organization. In the past five years, more than 80 leading financial organisations controlling trillions of USD have implemented tobacco free policies spanning investment, lending and insurance. In Australia – where the work began – 60% of funds under management (with funds under management approaching 1 Trillion Australian dollars) in the Australian pension industry are now tobacco-free.
In 2016, Tobacco Free Portfolios engaged with AXA, one of the world’s largest insurers, and was part of their move to divest tobacco industry assets valued at 1.8 billion Euros, putting the issue firmly on the mainstream agenda. Tobacco-free investment decisions were also made by AP4 – one of the most influential pension funds in Sweden; Medibank, the largest health insurer in Australia; France’s largest public pension fund Fonds De Reserves Pour Les Retraites; the Irish Sovereign Investment Fund and CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the USA. In 2017, Tobacco free Portfolios was delighted to work with BNP Paribas – the largest European Bank – who went tobacco-free in November. This year has already seen the initiative accelerate with the largest European pension fund – ABP – announcing its tobacco-free move less than one month ago.
Tobacco Free Portfolios is now engaging with large retail and investment institutions across the global finance sector, including in India, to give further wind to its mission.
Stubbing out the tobacco menace in India
The trend of tobacco abuse in India is increasing at alarming rates. According to some estimates, there are 27.5 crore tobacco users in the country and every third Indian adult uses some form of tobacco. About 10 lac Indians die from tobacco-related diseases each year and bout one-third of the population above 15 years of age is using some form of tobacco. “Nearly half of the cancers in India are attributable to tobacco,” says Dr. Pankaj Chaturvedi, Head and Neck Cancer Surgeon at Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Hospital.
In recognition of the global ‘tobacco epidemic’ in 2005 the UN Tobacco Treaty was established, the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), the world’s first global legally binding public health treaty. There are now 181 Parties, representing 89.4% of the world’s population, which makes it one of the most widely embraced treaties in United Nations’ history.
India too became a signatory to FCTC and the Government has since been implementing initiatives, including the National Tobacco Control Program (NTCP), for reducing tobacco usage and fulfilling its treaty obligations under FCTC.
However, the mission is fraught with dichotomies as huge public monies continue to be invested into the tobacco manufacturing companies by the country’s financial sector, including some public sector companies and insurance firms. In India, insurance companies, including large PSU insurers, are the biggest shareholders in tobacco manufacturing companies.
“People mostly are not even aware that their funds are being invested into the tobacco industry. Exposure to tobacco manufacturers may occur via equities, corporate bonds and derivatives,” Dr. King warns.
She herself was extremely disappointed when she first learnt that she and her colleagues at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne were unknowingly supporting tobacco through their superannuation (pension) investments – an action which came at the expense of their patients, whose lives, and those of their family and friends, were ravaged by the effects of lung cancer.
“Fortunately, things are changing quickly and the finance sector is coming to realize that being a good corporate citizen means collaborating across sectors and acting to help solve major global challenges. The tobacco-free finance momentum is starting to snowball. Finance leaders today want to be part of the solution to the tobacco epidemic, which is on track to kill 1 billion people this century,” she says.
One can only hope that Dr. King’s clarion call also awakens leaders in India’s financial sector and government machinery soon enough to get their acts together and embrace tobacco-free investments.
Dr. Bronwyn King, an Australian Radiation Oncologist and Founder and CEO of Tobacco Free Portfolios, engaged with India’s top financial institutions and corporates at the 8th Edition of TEDx Gateway to encourage them to adopt tobacco-free investment policies. Dr. King’s crusade for ending commercial engagements with tobacco firms have resulted in at least US $10 billion being shifted away from tobacco investments worldwide
