Tobacco.org

• Tobacco poison surrounds child workers  

The children pick through mountainous piles of waste tobacco and sweep it up with their bare hands into giant bags in the hope of scraping a living. From behind a veil of dust, they stare back at us with bloodshot eyes.

As the wind gathers in a fading dusk, infant siblings strapped to their mothers' backs wail amid swirling, noxious clouds of tobacco.

Beyond them, a parched maize plantation stretches into the distance towards the factory buildings of Alliance One, the world's largest tobacco processor and the source of up to 30% of the premium tobacco enjoyed by Britain's 13m smokers.

A Sunday Times investigation in the southern African state of Malawi has uncovered an environmental travesty that is being inflicted by the tobacco industry on some of the continent's poorest people.Downstream from the tobacco processing plants that dominate the outskirts of Lilongwe, the Malawian capital, rivers run yellow and green from industrial outflow -- water used for bathing by villagers who have no other option.

Even more alarming, however, is that in a community already plagued by Aids, cholera, malnutrition and one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, toxic tobacco waste is being dumped by contractors in open landfill sites where hundreds of children are picking through the remnants. . . .

This weekend a spokesman for the American-owned Alliance One said the company would build a wall round the landfill site to keep out children. He said: "We believe that we meet all environmental and other regulatory requirements in Malawi, but we are happy to work further with local authorities to further safeguard children from exposure at the municipal disposal site."

Few benefits from the tobacco industry filter down to Malawi's poor tobacco farmers who eke out a hopeless existence on less than 80p a day.

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Malawi tobacco sales drop nine percent: official  

Sales of Malawi’s main cash crop tobacco dropped nine percent to 433 million dollars (293 million euros) this year, as prices at the auction floor fell by nearly a quarter, the country’s crop watchdog said Wednesday.

“The tobacco market suffered some price setbacks and average prices were down by 23 percent per kilo this year,” Bruce Munthali, general manager of the Tobacco Control Commission, told reporters.

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Malawi tobacco sales 'drop 9%' 

Sales of Malawi's main cash crop tobacco dropped nine percent to 433 million dollars (293 million euros) this year, as prices at the auction floor fell by nearly a quarter, the country's crop watchdog said Wednesday.

"The tobacco market suffered some price setbacks and average prices were down by 23 percent per kilo this year," Bruce Munthali, general manager of the Tobacco Control Commission, told reporters.

Despite a record harvest of 208 million kilos of burley tobacco, average prices dropped to 1.86 dollars per kilo, from 2.42 dollars last year, he said..

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Malawi trying to enforce child labor laws  

Malawi is paying more attention to its child labor laws after a report revealed thousands of children working on tobacco farms, Plan International says.

Representatives of the children's advocacy group in London told CNN after its August report Malawi officials offered to determine the extent of the problem and better enforce child labor laws.

The August report indicated about 78,000 boys and girls as young as 5 years old work in tobacco harvesting, earning 17 cents for a 12-hour day.

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• Child tobacco farmers 'exposed to toxic levels of nicotine' 

* Children can absorb up to 50 cigarettes worth of nicotine on wet days

* Wearing gloves, washing clothes or bathing would all reduce exposure and risk

* Green Tobacco Sickness 'feels like death,' induces headaches, nausea

* Report reveals widespread abuse of child workers, withheld wages, violence . . .

Hundreds of thousands of children worldwide are thought to be working full-time on tobacco farms, suffering from toxic levels of nicotine exposure and abusive labor conditions.

Children as young as five-years-old work on tobacco farms in Malawi, according to Plan International.

In Malawi alone there are an estimated 78,000 boys and girls employed in tobacco harvesting. On average they earn 17 cents for a 12-hour day of back-breaking, bare-handed work, according to a recent report from Plan International.

Handling burley tobacco leaves without gloves, in unwashed clothes and rarely bathing, these children can absorb the same amount of nicotine in one day of harvesting that they would from smoking 50 cigarettes. . . .

Today UNICEF, the ILO, Plan and others all remain active in Malawi, working with the government to develop links between the ministries of labor and agriculture to end child labor on tobacco farms.

Since the report came out in August, Plan International told CNN in an email that "the government has been constructive in their response and are discussing/looking to work with Plan to conduct a national survey to gauge the true scale of the issue and better enforcement of existing child labor laws."

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Warning: Buying tobacco at less than minimum prices is hazardous, president says 

Foreign tobacco buyers who are paying less than agreed-upon prices for the country's main cash crop are the "enemy of the people" and will be expelled, said the president of this African nation, whose government this week deported three of them.

President Bingu wa Mutharika's administration ordered the expulsion of a South African and three British buyers, making good on a campaign promise.

"These individuals connived to deliberately frustrate the policy of this government to improve the welfare of our people through better prices of tobacco," Mutharika said in a special address to the nation Wednesday. "They have been sabotaging the Malawi economy and have been harming the very people who grow tobacco for them to buy."

When the deportation order came, one of the four officials was already out of the country. The others left Wednesday without speaking to reporters.

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Mutharika to deal with exploitative tobacco buyers if 

Malawi president Bingu wa Mutharika, has threatened to arrest any "tobacco colonialist" who defies his deportation order.

In a special address to the nation, broadcast on national radio and television, Mutharika said: "I ordered the deportation from our country of four foreign tobacco buyers -- Mr. Kelvin Stainton and Mr. Van de Merwe of Limbe Leaf Tobacco Company, Mr. Collin Armstrong of Alliance One and Mr. Alex Mackay of Premium TAMA.

"These individuals connived to deliberately frustrate the policy of this governm ent to improve the welfare of our people through better prices of tobacco. For a long time they have continued to exploit the poor people of Malawi by offering them much lower prices than those offered in neighbouring countries.

"In doing so, they have been sabotaging the Malawi economy and have been harming the very people who grow tobacco for them to buy," he said.

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Malawi expels South Africans in tobacco spat 

Malawi has expelled four South Africans working for international tobacco firms for price cutting and sabotaging the economy, President Bingu wa Mutharika said Wednesday.

"They were sabotaging the economy and harming tobacco growers," Mutharika said in a strongly worded denounciation of the four, in a special live broadcast to the nation.

Calling the four "colonialists", Mutharika said he ordered the immigration department to revoke their work permits. The four were employed by international wholesalers which buy tobacco at auction.

"For a long time, they have been stealing from poor farmers. It's sabotage and an act of hostility to our country," Mutharika said.

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Malawi defends tobacco expulsions 

Malawi's President Bingu wa Mutharika has defended his decision to deport four senior foreign tobacco buyers for flouting minimum-price rules.

"For a long time I've been warning these exploitative colonialists to pay fair prices to farmers," he said.

The minimum prices were introduced for burley and flue-cured tobacco, Malawi's main export earners, last year.

But buyers have resisted them, saying the global economic crisis has made them unrealistic.

The four expatriates, who included two chief executives, worked for three of the largest tobacco-buying companies in the southern African country.

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• Malawi Deports Universal, Alliance Tobacco Officials (Update3)  

Malawi, the world’s largest burley tobacco producer, said it will deport officials of Alliance One Inc. and the local unit of Universal Corp. for paying below government-mandated prices for the leaf.

“This is the action I have taken,” President Bingu wa Mutharika said in a speech broadcast live on the state-owned Malawi Broadcasting Corp. radio station today. “They have been defying my orders to pay better prices and I have decided to chase them.”

The government yesterday revoked temporary work permits for officials of Alliance One, Universal-unit Limbe Leaf Tobacco, and Premium Tama Tobacco Co., and issued them with 24-hour deportation orders. . . .

Malawi started setting minimum prices for the various grades of tobacco two years ago after it accused merchants of putting farmers out of business. While dealers denied that they underpaid farmers, Wa Mutharika on April 6 threatened to deport buyers if prices didn’t improve.

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WISHART: Malawi's children pay dearly for the world's cheap tobacco 

THE tobacco industry in Myrtleford died in late 2006 when British American Tobacco and Philip Morris decided they could buy tobacco leaves cheaper elsewhere. Indeed they could, with about 85 per cent of global production now coming from developing countries such as China, Brazil, Zimbabwe and Malawi. What they didn't reveal is the human cost of this low-priced leaf.

Seventy-eight thousand children are employed in the tobacco farms of Malawi in conditions barely better than slavery, daily enduring gross violations of their rights. They are paid just two cents an hour, working up to 12 hours a day. The work is unrelenting and pay is often docked for the cost of any food the employer might provide. The children are routinely abused, both physically and emotionally, to make them work harder and longer. Girls in particular are subjected to sexual abuse, often coerced by threats of withholding food, pay or employment. . . .

Tobacco multinationals have form when it comes to externalities. They have consistently treated the adverse cost of smoking as an externality that is not their responsibility. Only aggressive regulation and legal action in the developed countries of the world has managed to rein them in.

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MAGOMBE: Questions over Malawi Govt and Plan International approaches in tobacco saga  

Since Plan International’s alarming report about Malawi child-tobacco-pickers lit up the international media circuit like a fierce wildfire, the Malawi government and other stakeholders have been left rumbling.

So to speak, media articles covering the report were last week defined by the usual overtones that surround the horrific tales of vulnerable children in Africa. Reading Plan’s 81-page report, one would be Satan not to see the children’s ordeal in form of thought-provoking cartoons drawn to support Madonna’s ‘save Malawi orphans’ charitable expeditions.

It explains why, shedding crocodile tears, government has swiftly expressed shock over Plan’s report, faulting the organisation on what it sees as a concocted figure of 78,000 children said to be working in the industry. . . .

The truth in as far as the Malawi tobacco hullabaloo is concerned, is that, although government has underlined its objections to the report, Plan International has a compelling case that should propel moral responsibility from various stakeholders. It does not take rocket science for anyone to understand, as Plan has revealed, that children (whether working with parents or not) risk being harmed through unprotected work, more so, nicotine poisoning.

It is touching that children as young as five are working long hours for K26 a day in the Malawi tobacco industry as they face the health risks of nicotine absorption equivalent to smoking 50 cigarettes, in addition to experiencing physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

The problem is that disclosures of woes like these quite often leave NGOs scared of entering the dangerous territory of offending governments. Zimbabwe’s Mugabe and Sudan’s al-Bashir, for example, have not hesitated to sternly warn NGOs deemed to be spreading negative stories of expulsion.

But love it or hate it, decorated by the 8.3% forecast for economic growth in 2008, Malawi remains poor. . . .

Another obvious bottleneck is Malawi’s failure to diversify its economy and accordingly end the near-total dependence on tobacco, which faces the legitimate hammering from the anti-tobacco lobby. . . .

With its tremendous work in Malawi, Plan’s report on death-traps inside tobacco estates, is probably driven by pure good will. Whereas President Bingu wa Mutharika has been busy throwing thunderous curses and deportation threats at tobacco buyers who peddle exploitative prices against the fixed minimum tags, his government cannot escape its obligation to properly oversee the production of the golden leaf.

It is evident though that, unless Malawi significantly fights poverty, diversifies its economy and realises good governance, children will continue to be exploited and abused. And Plan will have more work to do.

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Children poisoned picking tobacco, study finds  

Child labourers in Africa's tobacco fields are slowly being poisoned by their exposure to high levels of nicotine and tobacco dust, while multinational companies increasingly shift their tobacco production to Africa, a new study says.

Many of the child workers, some as young as 5 years old, are exposed to the equivalent of 36 cigarettes a day as a result of absorbing nicotine through their skin from the tobacco leaves that they handle, according to the study to be released today by Plan International, a development agency based in Britain.

The children described how they have trouble breathing, suffer headaches and chest pains, and even cough blood as a result of toiling for up to 12 hours a day as tobacco pickers in the African country of Malawi, one of the biggest tobacco producers in the world.

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Malawi Tobacco Traded 18% Below State Price Last Week (Update1)  

The price of tobacco in Malawi, Africa’s second-largest producer of the burley variety, traded 18 percent below the government-mandated price of $2.15 last week, said Auction Holdings Ltd., which manages the country’s auction floors.

The leaf sold at an average $1.77 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) during the week ended Aug. 21, Auction Holdings said in a weekly sales report published in the Daily Times newspaper today. Since the market opened on March 16, tobacco has sold for an average of $1.72, it said.

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Malawi child tobacco workers exposed to nicotine  

Children picking tobacco in the fields of Malawi for consumers far beyond the African country's borders are being poisoned as they absorb up to two cigarette packs' worth of nicotine each day, a children's rights organization said Monday,

The "extremely high levels of nicotine poisoning" produces not only nausea, headaches, dizziness, difficulty in breathing and other symptoms but "long-lasting changes in brain structure and function," London-based Plan International said in a report.

It noted that large-tobacco production has shifted from the United States to developing countries like Malawi, where "children are being exposed to exploitative and hazardous working conditions."

More than 78,000 children, some as young as 5, work on tobacco estates across the southern African country, some up to 12 hours a day for less than 1.7 cents an hour and without protective clothing, the report asserted.

Entitled "Hard work, long hours and little pay," the report said workers absorb up to 54 milligrams a day of dissolved nicotine through their skin. The report initially said that is equivalent to 32 cigarettes but Plan International revised it to 50.

"Sometimes it feels like you don't have enough breath, you don't have enough oxygen," an unnamed child tobacco worker in Kasungu, in central Malawi, told Plan International's investigators. "You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end ... you remain with a headache."

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