The rolling green hills and quaint farm houses paint a picturesque image…with tales of family-run tobacco farmsteads passed down from generation to generation. Dig a little deeper and what lies beneath is a trail of devastation – from debt bondage to deforestation, it’s an industry fraught with treacherous and perilous conditions.

This is not an article about the dangers of smoking; its not about how a smoker inhales more than 4000 chemical additives in each puff (some classified as toxic and not even allowed in food), nor is an expose outlining the myriad of diseases smokers die from every day. This is a saga outlining the plight of the grassroots level of the multibillion dollar tobacco industry. Forget your lungs, what about the planet?

Controversial Crop

Tobacco is one of the world’s most controversial crops. For years now, cigarette companies have experienced increasing pressure from governments, health groups, and declining public opinion. Reports stream in weekly, detailing how tobacco companies’ practices contribute to deforestation, mono-cropping, food insecurity, and pesticide contamination in developing countries, creating additional threats to Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. Using fiscal arguments, the multibillion dollar conglomerates responded; persuading governments, the media, and the general population that smoking benefits the economy. Their claim: if tobacco control measures are introduced, tax revenues will fall, jobs will be lost, and there will be great hardship to the economy.

Ok fair enough, more jobs lost in this current economic climate would prove dire, but what of the economic costs which tobacco inflicts upon every country? The production of tobacco incurs cost to governments, to employers, and to the environment; including social, welfare, and healthcare spending; loss of foreign exchange in importing cigarettes; loss of land that could grow food; costs of fires and damage to buildings caused by careless smoking; environmental costs ranging from deforestation to collection of smokers’ litter; absenteeism; decreased productivity; higher numbers of accidents, and higher insurance premiums.

Distressingly, parents send children as young as five years old to tobacco fields instead of school, preventing children from attaining an education. Tobacco companies degrade land and aggravate food insecurity through the farming of tobacco instead of less harmful export crops or food crops. Tobacco farmers and environments are vulnerable to poisoning from pesticides and fertilizers. Inflated costs for seeds and fertilizers and low tobacco prices paid by global tobacco companies contribute to farmer indebtedness to farm landlords and tobacco companies. And the list goes on.

Grown in over 125 countries across the world, on over four million hectares of land, the global tobacco crop is worth approximately USD20 billion, a small fraction of the total amount generated from the sale of manufactured tobacco products. The anomaly…the millions of tobacco farmers worldwide who should be sharing in this revenue, are in fact exploited by the tobacco industry, increasing their debt burden by binding them to watertight contracts, all the while using their economic plight to argue against efforts to control tobacco.

Slavery and Child Labor

Need another rationale to stop giving cigarette companies your hard-earned cash? Recent investigations by Human Rights Watch (HRW) found children as young as 10 picking tobacco destined for Philip Morris cigarettes.  Just last month, the organization uncovered a series of injustices migrants from Central Asia countries faced while working in tobacco fields in Kazakhstan. Kazakh farm owners employ the migrants – mainly child labor. The farm owners in turn contract with and supply tobacco leaf to Philip Morris Kazakhstan, a subsidiary of Philip Morris International, one of the largest tobacco companies in the world. In many cases families were expected to pay back unrealistic debts to intermediaries who had arranged for their journeys to Kazakhstan, in schemes that bear all the hallmarks of people trafficking. All this, outlined in the report “Hellish Work” issued by HRW, which stressed, “Involvement of children in such work is a crime because they are exposed to large doses of nicotine, which is hazardous to health.” According to specialists, within one working day a child absorbs the nicotine in quantities equivalent to 36 smoked cigarettes; eventually they contract acute toxicity.

When Will We Wake Up?

Slave labor, deforestation, debt bondage, funding terror organizations…these factors aside from the dangers of smoking should lead to the end of such a surreptitious industry, yet year upon year, billions of dollars are generated from the sale of tobacco products.

The WHO estimates that tobacco causes about five million deaths per year and that smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in developed countries. If current smoking trends continue, they estimate that by the year 2030, more than eight million people will die yearly from tobacco-related causes, with one person dying every eight seconds from the 15 billion cigarettes sold every day.

Future predictions are by their nature speculative but some things are certain: the tobacco epidemic, with its attendant health and economic burden, is both increasing and also shifting from developed to developing nations. The industry is consolidating and also shifting from the west to developing regions, where there may be less government control and public debate about the role of transnational tobacco companies. The future looks austere; the global tobacco epidemic is worse today than it was 50 years ago, and it will be even worse in another 50 years unless an extraordinary effort is made now. Alas, even if banned, tobacco would find its way into the black market since there will always be people who smoke. Every day, more than 100, 000 people start smoking, with nearly of quarter of these having their first cigarette before the age of 10. When will this cycle ever end?

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