According to a WHO report, “More than 90 percent of the world’s tobacco is grown in low- and middle-income countries, mostly by smallholder farmers who need to use unpaid family labor to make ends meet, leading to child labor.” As the market penetration of cigarettes continues to shrink among adults worldwide, the big tobacco companies have pushed tobacco growing from the United States and Europe to countries where labor is cheap, and where they can have influence on policy. In Kenya, it takes 1,000 hours of unpaid labor to raise one acre of tobacco.
Some countries even offer subsidies to the companies, as well as tax holidays, low wages, and lax environmental standards. In Lebanon, small-scale production is so unprofitable that it could not exist without government subsidies. “Governments in African countries are often desperate for foreign direct investment,” said Roy Maconachie, professor of social and policy sciences at the University of Bath, during a public discussion of his film, Tobacco Slave. “These are poor countries, they’re often dependent on a single commodity. The companies often wield more power than the country itself.”
Despite the decline, we’re still the fifth-largest tobacco producer in the world, producing more than 200,000 metric tons last year. If we stopped growing tobacco tomorrow, those pounds would end up being grown somewhere else, becoming someone else’s problem. But there are still good reasons to end it now, and opportunities to be lost if we don’t.
Tobacco is a crop with few redeeming qualities. You can’t eat it, you can’t build houses with it, you can’t feed hogs with it, and the billion-plus people who smoke it get a little high, become addicted, and end up dying by the millions each year. Around 1.3 million nonsmokers die per year from exposure to secondhand smoke. If trends continue, nearly one billion people worldwide will die this century due to smoking. Tobacco production uses and pollutes 22 billion tons of water, or 0.2 percent of the Amazon River’s annual discharge. According to the World Health Organization, “for every kilogram of tobacco that is not produced, consumed, and disposed of,” one person’s yearly need for drinking water can be met. Up to 25 percent of tobacco farmers worldwide suffer from green tobacco sickness, or nicotine poisoning, through repeated contact with the leaves. There are 1.3 million children involved in tobacco growing worldwide. Five percent of the world’s annual deforestation is attributable to clearing forests for tobacco fields. Production and consumption of tobacco annually releases 80 million tons of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere.