Discontent with TPD2 has also been brewing in some sectors of Europe’s tobacco industry. Although the directive has yet to come into effect, Germany’s Cigar Industry Federation (BdZ) has voiced strong opposition against the directive’s T&T provisions since last year, even appealing to the government “to protect the interests of medium-sized enterprises” in the country.
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In a press release issued in November of 2017, BdZ pointed out that while the cigar industry was still trying to cope with the recently implemented FCTC protocol, it now also had to brace for TPD2, which is to come into force rather sooner than later. “For the cigar industry, these [TBD2 T&T] provisions not only mean an extreme financial burden but in addition, they also are completely nonsensical,” the association’s managing director, Bodo Mehrlein, commented in the press release. “The traceability system [proposed by TBD2] is supposed to combat tobacco smuggling, but this doesn’t occur in the market segment for cigars and cigarillos anyway. Therefore, [the relevant provisions] severely violate the principle of proportionality that ought to be the basis or any law or regulation.”
BdZ recently challenged Germany’s federal government to reject the draft directive. “Further rounds of negotiation are needed to arrive at a framework that also can be implemented by the cigar industry both operationally and economically“, Mehrlein urged. “It must not be allowed“, he said, “that the EU can create an enormous bureaucracy monster that will snuff out medium-sized cigar companies whose products are not being smuggled in the first place.” The directive in its current form, he added, not only required the affixing of a tracking code to products in order to trace distribution channels and sales markets but that - at a later stage - a flood of additional data, even including the license plates of trucks and vans deployed” would have to be added. „Production must be controlled through an appropriate system provided by an independent third-party“, Mehrlein said, mirroring almost exactly the demands of ITSA’s Nicola Sudan (see main story).
But apart from violating the principle of proportionality, the EU directive in the opinion of BdZ also disregards the harmonization of the EU domestic market as well as neglect the need for “better regulation” in favor of inflated red-tape bureaucracy. Mehrlein cautioned that „in the end, the only winners under such a cost-intensive regulation are going to be the well-financed international cigarette industry corporations, while medium-sized cigar companies will be driven to the limits of their financial capacity.”