Islamabad, Pakistan, July 9, 2026: Fair Trade in Tobacco (FTT) has strongly rejected the latest statement issued by the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) calling for another increase in Federal Excise Duty on cigarettes, terming it a selective, donor-driven and misleading intervention that ignores the real crisis in Pakistan’s tobacco economy: the illegal cigarette mafia.
Muhammad Amin, Chairman of Fair Trade in Tobacco, Pakistan, said SPARC and similar foreign-supported activist organizations have built a repeated pattern of attacking only the legal, documented and tax-paying tobacco sector, while remaining almost completely silent on the massive tax theft, black-market manufacturing, smuggling and non-duty-paid cigarette sales that are damaging the national exchequer.
“SPARC talks about raising taxes on the legal tobacco sector, knowing very well that the illegal cigarette mafia neither believes in paying taxes nor pays them. This is not serious policymaking. This is a manufactured truth built on selective numbers, repeated slogans and donor-driven pressure,” Amin said.
He said SPARC’s claim that higher cigarette taxes will automatically generate Rs. 51 billion in additional revenue, prevent 370,000 young people from starting smoking and push 270,000 smokers to quit is not corroborated by any serious official study placed before the public. These figures, he said, appear to be advocacy numbers designed to influence the federal budget, not neutral economic evidence based on Pakistan’s ground realities.
“Organizations like SPARC have become experts in converting assumptions into facts, projections into truth and donor-funded advocacy into national policy pressure. Their old strategy is simple: repeat a claim so many times that it begins to look like a fact to readers, viewers and policymakers,” Amin said.
FTT said the most serious omission in SPARC’s statement is its silence on illegal cigarettes. Pakistan’s tobacco market is not a textbook case of a clean market where higher taxes are applied evenly across all players. One segment is documented, monitored, audited, and taxed. The other segment operates outside the tax system, sells cheap non-duty-paid cigarettes, evades Federal Excise Duty and sales tax, violates pricing rules, escapes the Track and Trace System, and undermines the state.
Amin said the Federal Board of Revenue has itself acknowledged the scale of the illegal cigarette crisis. Official and publicly reported statements have placed annual losses from illegal cigarettes at up to Rs. 250 billion to Rs. 300 billion. Yet SPARC and similar organizations continue to frame the entire debate as though the only policy issue is how much more tax should be extracted from the legal industry.
“This selective silence is not innocent. When an organization pushes higher taxation but refuses to confront illegal factories, smuggled brands, unstamped packs, tax-evading manufacturers, and retail black markets, its activism objectively benefits the illegal cigarette mafia. Whether intended or not, the result is the same: pressure on compliant companies and protection by silence for tax thieves,” Amin said.
FTT said the government should treat such activism with caution. Foreign-funded local non-government organizations have every right to participate in public debate. Still, they have no right to dominate Pakistan’s fiscal policymaking through unverified, imported and agenda-driven claims. The Government of Pakistan must set tax policy in line with Pakistan’s market realities, enforcement capacity, revenue needs, and the documented behavior of legal and illegal operators.
Amin called on the federal government, the Ministry of Finance, the Federal Board of Revenue, and the Ministry of National Health Services to demand full disclosure from all organizations engaged in tobacco-tax advocacy, including their donors, project funding, technical partners, policy objectives, research methodologies, and data sources.
“Pakistan cannot afford policymaking by foreign-funded pressure groups that talk loudly about taxes but quietly ignore tax thieves. The country needs enforcement against the illegal cigarette mafia, not another donor-driven campaign against companies that are already inside the tax net,” Amin said.
FTT urged the government not to be swayed by SPARC’s unverified claims and to focus instead on shutting illegal factories, seizing non-duty-paid cigarettes, enforcing Track and Trace, prosecuting tax evaders, stopping smuggling and protecting legitimate tax revenue. “The real national interest lies in one policy: tax compliance must be protected, illegal trade must be punished, and fake facts must not be allowed to sabotage Pakistan’s revenue base,” Amin said.