Abstract
Free trade agreements are intended to spread high-quality goods to all member countries without
any barriers so that the standard of living and the wealth of the member countries would be heightened.
Tobacco, however, is not a typical good. On the contrary, it is detrimental to human life. The more cigarettes
are smoked, the more harmis incurred by both the consumer and the people in the same environment.
Hence, the dissemination of tobacco products should be controlled. This paper considers statistical
data and relevant articles, and then presents the negative impacts of free trade agreements. After a tariff
reduction of 5 percentage points resulting from the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA), the production
of domestic and foreign cigarettes rose. Likewise, the tobacco consumption rate among adolescences
expanded. Despite a wide-ranging campaign to reduce smoking, the decline in the tobacco consumption
rate in other age groups was not as remarkable as it should have been. Moreover, AFTA hindered the
development of tobacco-control regulations. The government was likely to soften the new regulations to
avoid infringing on the free trade agreement, whereas the tobacco industry worked to prevent such regulations
in the first place by threatening the government with the terms of the free trade agreement. This
paper, therefore, suggests that, in order to strengthen tobacco-control schemes, tobacco products should
be put on the exclusion list of free trade agreements.
