African countries are a major possible market for the tobacco industry, and the smoking epidemic is at various stages of evolution across the continent. Ghana is an African country with a low influence of smoking despite an active tobacco industry presence for over 50 years.

Anti-tobacco researchers worry because in some countries cigarettes are very cheap. For example, such a situation can be found in Ghana. For them, cheap tobacco products means more minors will start smoking.

Researchers explained that a stick of cigarette could go for as low as five Ghana pesewa. A pack can also go for only between GHC1.00 and GHC1.50p. Meantime, in the United States, a pack could go for as much as $5.00, the equivalent of over GHC7.00.

Smoking parents do not help matters, because they even send their children to buy them the stuff and in the process the children start to smoking. Other children are asked to sit by stores and sell cigarettes which all go to introduce them to smoking. However, tobacco has been found to contain a lot of harmful chemicals that cause cancer and other health damages, like impotence and infertility in humans.

The World Health Organization (WHO) plans, for example, that if nothing is done about it, tobacco will kill 6 million people in 2010, more than HIV, Malaria and TB joined, and over 10 million smokers and passive smokers by 2030 with 70% in developing countries including Ghana. In Ghana, Organizations like Vision for Alternative Development (VALD) have been winning the passage of the Tobacco Control Bill into law to help control the industry and defend the lives of the country’s human resource.

Researchers declared that if tobacco is so cheap in Ghana, it stands to reason that in their curiosity, some children would like to try it out and in the process they get hooked up. Moreover Government should make an ascending regulation in the taxes imposed on tobacco products to make them extensively unattractive in the country. A hundred percent increase in this direction will be a good step.

Researchers concluded that in Ghana the children get hooked up to smoking only because their smoking parents and of course because cheap tobacco products.