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According to the World Health Organization, in 25 years tobacco related disease will kill 8.4 million people annually -- more than 3.5 times the number of people it kills today. Most of this increase will occur in developing countries where the Tobacco Industry has been working hard to open markets to promote its product, especially to women and youth, to ensure its profits.

''The unheralded scandal of the tobacco industry is the damage to land in developing nations'' was the message of a presentation delivered at the Fifth World Conference on Smoking and Health in Canada on July 12, 1983.(1) This discussion paper will adddress, in more detail, the links with tobacco and deforestation, pesticide use, land use, environmental degradation, fires, litter and pollution.

While the tobacco settlement in the US is termed, ''a landmark agreement once unimaginable'' and a ''turn around'' we here in Asia cannot remotely share in the rejoicing. On the contrary what it means is we have to brace ourselves for a further onslaught of more aggressive marketing of American cigarettes here.

The tobacco industry offers a compelling case study in the breakdown of democratic principles. Facing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation of their deadly product in the US, tobacco giants Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco set the pace for the spending frenzy of 1996. Philip Morris was the #1 contributor overall in the federal election cycle, and spent over $12 million to lobby federal officials in just the first six months of the election year. RJR Nabisco was a top corporate donor, especially of unregulated ''soft'' money, and is a pioneer in ''astroturf'' lobbying to rally its consumers behind the corporate agenda.

Here are some facts about the effects of smoking and tobacco on Asians and Pacific Islanders.

The following tobacco industry facts were excerpted with permission from INFACT's web site. INFACT is a national grassroots corporate watchdog organization founded in 1977.

The Tobacco Free Coalition sponsored a ground breaking forum to set an agenda for global tobacco control policies in San Francisco on Monday May 19, 1997. At the Forum the Coalition presented its Global Tobacco Control Policy Framework which outlines actions that can be done locally to address the global impact of tobacco.

The following is excerpted from the World Health Organization's Tobacco Use: A Public Health Disaster.

As 33% of San Franciscans are immigrants, the Coalition believes that it must think globally and act locally in the development of a Global Tobacco Control Policy Framework.

To get some perspective on the deal negotiated with the tobacco industry CorpWatch spoke with Stanton Glantz, Professor of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Glantz, a long-time tobacco crusader, is the author of the Cigarette Papers, the published version of internal documents leaked to him from the Brown and Williamson tobacco corporation.