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.
