Approximately one billion people smoke or use tobacco products worldwide.
If you calculate that the average smoker needs 20 cigarettes a day to successfully support his addiction then that calculates into +- R30 billion rand a day or 4.25 billion Dollars daily.
If you then calculate this by 365 days in the year then you arrive at a figure of one trillion five hundred and 51 billion dollars a year or to read it easier that's 1 551 000 000 US Dollars a year.
This is slightly more than 10%of the GDP of the worlds largest economy or 3.33%of the entire worlds GDP.
This means that of every hundred Dollars that the world creates annually 3.3 Dollars is spent on cigarettes, pipe tobacco,cigars,chewing tobacco or any other tobacco related consumption habit!
Quite remarkable and correct me, if I am wrong,this must make the tobacco industry the largest industry in the world.
How much profit do the worlds tobacco companies make?Are they not the most profitable industry in the world.
Given the growth in the worlds population and the rise in tobacco consumption in India and China, we can honestly say that their growth potential knows no end and that they must be the best possible investment for anyone who has money to invest on any stock exchange in the world.
Does this come as any surprise that it's so hard for governments to simply ban the consumption of tobacco products? If they did, their governments would find it suddenly very hard to find foreign investors to invest in their economies not to speak about international banking groups or organizations.
How much would it take for a NGO organization to investigate this phenomenon? to simply draw up a list of the investors in tobacco companies worldwide and make this list public knowledge?
This information is surely available if you should require it or am I naive to believe this! Why, I ask,do the worlds biggest and oldest tobacco companies come from the US and the UK?
These countries like to place themselves at the forefront of the world human rights movement and profess themselves to be the moral leaders of the international community!As my good wife likes to say..."Something stinks in the forest"
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