The tobacco market remains an important source of profit for manufacturers, tax revenues for governments and livelihood for farmers, despite the global rise of efforts to combat smoking and a relative decline in global tobacco use in the past two decades. Amid the downward trend, both tobacco cultivation and cigarette production have increasingly come under the control of a small number of multinational companies.

In Turkey, historically a major tobacco producer, the global changes have led to a cigarette industry fully controlled by foreign companies, a steep increase in the use of imported tobacco for cigarette production and an equally sharp decline in domestic tobacco cultivation. Today, locally produced tobacco accounts for only 11% of the tobacco used by the manufacturers that have come to rule the country’s cigarette industry as a result of privatization.

Five multinational giants — British American Tobacco, Philip Morris International, Imperial Brands, Japan Tobacco and Altria Group — dominate the global tobacco market today, holding sway over all links of the chain, from cultivation to cigarette production and sales. As such, they influence decisions on what types and amounts of tobacco are grown, where they are grown and what varieties are blended for cigarette making, thus steering the course of tobacco farming and cigarette industries in various countries. 

Along with the Virginia and Burley varieties, Oriental tobacco — known also as Turkish tobacco — is a basic variety that constituted a major link in the Ottomans’ participation in the world economy. It was also among the basic products that became subject to foreign monopoly as part of a European-controlled regime created in 1881 to collect debt from the cash-strapped empire.