Fewer people are smoking, especially women, but only one country in eight is on track to meet a target of reducing tobacco use significantly by 2025, the World Health Organisation says.
Three million people die prematurely each year due to tobacco use that causes cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and stroke, the world's leading killers, it said, marking World No Tobacco Day.
They include 890,000 deaths through second-hand smoke exposure.
"The worldwide prevalence of tobacco smoking has decreased from 27 per cent in 2000 to 20 per cent in 2016, so progress has been made," Douglas Bettcher, director of WHO's prevention of non-communicable diseases department, told a news briefing.
Launching WHO's global report on trends in prevalence of tobacco smoking, he said industrialised countries were making faster progress than developing countries.
"One of the major factors impeding low- and middle-income countries certainly is countries face resistance by a tobacco industry who wishes to replace clients who die by freely marketing their products and keeping prices affordable for young people," he said on Wednesday.
Progress in kicking the habit is uneven, with the Americas the only region set to meet the target of a 30 per cent reduction in tobacco use by 2025 compared with 2010, for both men and women, WHO said.
However, the US is not on track, bogged down by litigation over warnings on cigarette packaging and lags in taxation, said Vinayak Prasad of the WHO's tobacco control unit.
Parts of Western Europe had reached a "standstill", particularly due to a failure to get women to stop smoking, African men were lagging and tobacco use in the Middle East was actually set to increase, WHO said.
Overall, tobacco kills more than seven million a year and many people know it increases the risk of cancer.
But many tobacco users in China and India are unaware of their increased risk of developing heart disease and stroke, making it urgent to step up awareness campaigns, it said.
China and India have the highest numbers of smokers worldwide, accounting for 307 million and 106 million, respectively, of the world's 1.1 billion adult smokers, followed by Indonesia with 74 million, WHO figures show.
India also has 200 million of the world's 367 million smokeless tobacco users.
