Tobacco is a crop as addictive to growers in the developing world as it is to any user. For them, the dependency is economic rather than physical. While the ready cash the crop offers is attractive, farmers are beginning to realize that growing tobacco is threatening the health of their families, their land, and their local ecosystems.
Despite the downsides of tobacco production, farmers find it difficult to say no to the crop because major tobacco companies provide loans for inputs like fertilizer and pesticides, assured markets, and annual cash payments for harvest. As the companies are often the sole buyer and grader of the crops, farmers are at a distinct disadvantage and often find themselves tied to a vicious debt cycle.
Tobacco is an intensive crop, requiring high inputs and labor. There are several downsides to tobacco growing: unpredictable prices, uneven cash flow, pernicious effects on soil fertility, and ill health and birth defects from handling agricultural chemicals and tobacco leaf. Farm families are exposed to fertilizers and pesticides during planting and growing, toxic tar from green leaves during harvest, and fumes from kilns during curing. Forests are cut down for firewood to cure the leaves and the use of chemicals causes broader damage to the environment. And because tobacco is so labour-intensive, children are often pulled out of school to work, especially tending fires to cure the tobacco leaves.
UBINIG, an NGO in Bangladesh, and Carleton University (Canada), in collaboration with the Bangladeshi farmers' movement, Nayakrishi Andolon (NA) have been studying why small-scale farmers continue to grow tobacco despite these concerns. While farmers are often attracted by ready markets and ready cash, only a few seem to do detailed accounting of their actual production costs. Those who do factor in their high labour and opportunity costs, often decide they are better off growing mixed food crops for themselves and local markets rather than tobacco, even if those crops yield less cash in the short term.
The research is part of a group of three projects in Bangladesh, Malawi, and Kenya. Each project tailors its approach to the common problem of helping farmers shift out of tobacco production. The Bangladeshi focus is on diversifying food and market crop production using NA's ecological and cooperative principles. The Kenyan effort is researching ways of replacing the tobacco mono crop with more environmentally friendly giant bamboo. In Malawi, where tobacco is the main source of income and foreign exchange, the thrust is to help tobacco farmers diversify away from total reliance on tobacco, not to drop it entirely.
Lessons will be shared among farming communities in these countries, and in many others. The research is part of an attempt to present workable, sustainable, economic options to farmers who have difficulty seeing alternatives to growing tobacco as a means to earn their living.
Meanwhile, The Nation newspaper in Malawi reports that the country's tobacco has been dogged by poor auction prices, few buyers and the World Health Organisation-backed anti-smoking lobby. And in an attempt to negotiate better prices, Malawi has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with tobacco producing countries Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique for a joint effort at collective marketing as well as value-addition.
The revelation of attempts at regional intervention comes barely two weeks after President Mutharika had talks with a high powered delegation from the United States based Universal Corporation, major shareholders in Malawi's Limbe Leaf Tobacco Company, to try and resolve the price issue. The discussions hit a deadlock.
Impoverished Malawi is coming fresh from a disastrous year for tobacco which saw margins going down despite a significant increase in production volumes and quality induced by good rains and the fertilizer subsidy programme implemented by government. Despite a production boom last year, revenue from the country's number one foreign exchange earner recorded a decline of 15 percent.
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