Tobacco.org

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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• Hard work, long hours and little pay / Research with children working on tobacco farms in Malawi (PDF) 

Multinational tobacco companies have slowly and surely been shifting their production from the fields of the United States to developing countries in a bid to cut costs. This shift has seen a massive drop in U.S tobacco production – to a point where 75% of production is now found in developing countries.

While this change should mean more employment and greater benefits for the local economy, this is not always the case. Despite the profits of the multinational companies, local tobacco farmers continually struggle to break even. This leads them to look for ways to cut costs and means more children are being exposed to exploitative and hazardous working conditions.

While the tobacco companies obviously profit from these reduced labour costs, children in Malawi receive just 17 U.S cents (11 pence) for 12 hours of unrelenting work.

As one of the world’s largest tobacco producers, Malawi is reliant on the tobacco industry for its national income and thousands of children, some as young as five, work in the fields to support their families. Through original participatory research, Plan has gained an insight into the realities of their lives.

As well as long hours and little pay, children revealed that they suffer physical and sexual abuse from their supervisors, regularly have their pay withheld and are unknowingly blighted by the effects of Green Tobacco Sickness. (GTS)

The emotional and physical impact that these conditions have on their wellbeing is immense. As well as the long-term psychosocial effects of abuse, the hazardous working conditions could seriously impair their development.

GTS is a poisoning found in workers who cultivate and harvest tobacco and is exacerbated by rain or dew on the crop.* On humid days the average field worker may be exposed to as much as 54 mg of dissolved nicotine – the equivalent to more than 32 average cigarettes.

“Numerous animal studies have shown that administration of nicotine during childhood and adolescence produces long-lasting changes in brain structure and function, as well as behavioral changes, that are not seen when nicotine is administered to adults. Thus the brain of a child or adolescent is particularly vulnerable to long lasting adverse neurobehavioral effects of nicotine exposure.” . . .

Executive summary

Malawi has the highest incidence of child labour in southern Africa. 88.9% of the children in the age group 5-14 work in the agricultural sector, where tobacco estates are highly represented. The number of children working on tobacco farms in Malawi has been estimated at 78,000 although the actual number is thought to be much higher.

Previous research gives some information on the different activities children are engaged in on tobacco farms, some information about the hazards children face and some understanding of why children are involved in this work. But very little work has been done with children themselves to find out how they experience and understand the work they do or to find out what children see as the best form of intervention.

For this reason Plan Malawi decided to undertake this participatory study. The research will be used to inform the work Plan and its partners in Malawi are doing to raise awareness of child labour on tobacco farms, to advocate for changed conditions and to develop interventions for the affected children.

The research approach was a participatory one in which 44 children (aged 12-18)

from three districts across Malawi (Lilongwe, Kasungu and Mzimba) took part in a series of workshops. All of the children had worked full-time on tobacco farms during the 2007/2008 season. 16 were working full-time on tobacco farms at the time of the research and 18 part-time. The children worked on a range of different farms from large estates to small family farms. All worked outside their own families. Parents and para-civic educators were also consulted.

The workshops, which were carefully constructed to take into account ethical issues, included drawing, mapping, storytelling and discussion. All of the discussion was recorded and transcribed and this formed the data which was analysed using thematic analysis. The findings are presented under the set of themes that emerged from the analysis.

Hard work, long hours and little pay

The children did the full range of tasks on the farms; there was no differentiation between work done by children and adults. Most of the children worked for 12 hours a day though some worked for much longer. Apart from the break for lunch (usually the only meal of the day) there were few breaks. The unrelenting nature of the work was one of the issues raised by the children. Children reported that the work was often too hard for their size and that they often had pay deducted if they did not finish the work given for that day.

The average daily wage earned by the children in the study was MK26 (USD0.18), reportedly less than that of adults. The children reported often being paid according to the work they did and some had worked with parents to help parents finish their quota of work.

One of the issues that concerned children was that they were often paid less than the amount they were promised at the beginning of the season. Most reported that the money they earned was not enough to meet the needs at home that had motivated them to seek work in the first place.

Why we are working

The main reason children gave for working was poverty at home. Lack of food, clothes and the need to mend their houses as well as the need for fertiliser and seed

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for their family farms were common needs at home. School fees (for secondary school) and school needs were also common reasons given for working.

It was clear that it was the children themselves who chose to work because of the situation at home. In fact many of them expressed a strong sense of responsibility toward their families, particularly those living with aging grandparents, or ill or disabled parents.

One significant finding is that though the criteria for selecting the children did not include vulnerability (para-civic educators were told to find ‘children who were working on tobacco farms’) it emerged that a large majority of the children came from elderly-headed households or orphan households. 22 of the children in the sample were double orphans and 12 were single orphans. This suggests that children from vulnerable families are more likely to be involved in child labour.

Abuse from supervisors

Children reported physical abuse in the form of beating (with a stick and hand) and kicking from supervisors. Supervisors also withheld food and used verbal abuse, often related to their orphan status.

Sexual abuse was also widely reported. Supervisors used their power to force girls to have sex in exchange for more money, food and late arrival at work. Girls reported that if they lived at the farm they slept apart from their parents and owners or supervisors came to rape them at night. This issue was raised by boys who felt angry at their powerlessness to do anything, and by girls who were clearly afraid, often thinking about what was in store for them on the way to work. Girls also reported that very few girls talked about this issue.

Impact of work on children

Apart from aching muscles caused by work that was too hard for them and the beatings they experienced the children reported a number of troubling physical symptoms. Health problems that are related to lack of access to soap and water and time to bath were commonly reported.

Symptoms of Green Tobacco Sickness were widely reported . . .

Recommendations

A set of recommendations around advocacy, public education and direct intervention for working children is included in the report. These include the need to use the information in the report to inform advocacy around poverty alleviation, particularly in relation to vulnerable households. The report provides powerful stories that can be used to lobby for stronger punishment for those who break labour laws and employ children and to lobby for more effective implementation of the labour laws that do exist.

The report also provides evidence for use in advocacy programmes around access to schooling generally and the need for programmes to help working children who wish to return to school. The need for research into school models that cater for working children is another recommendation raised in the report.

A set of recommendations is made in relation to the health status of working children.

These include access to health services, particularly testing for TB and HIV.

A number of recommendations are also made around public education. These include the need to educate the general public about vulnerable children and the need to care for them rather than to discriminate against them. Education around child rights for children and for adults should also be a priority. Para-civic educators are a potential resource for education campaigns at local level. This public education needs specifically to include programmes for children who are not working about children who are working.

Mechanisms that allow children to report abuses at work and programmes that offer psychosocial support for working children should be a priority.

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• Malawi child tobacco workers exposed to nicotine 

Young tobacco pickers in this southern African country are exposed to "extremely high levels of nicotine poisoning," a London-based children's rights organization said in a report released Monday.

"As the tobacco industry continues to shift its production to developing countries, more vulnerable children are being exposed to these hazardous working conditions," said a report by Plan International. "It is estimated that over 78,000 children work on tobacco estates across Malawi, some up to 12 hours a day, many for less than 1.7 cents an hour and without protective clothing."

The report, entitled "Hard work, little pay and long hours," asserts that child laborers, some as young as five, suffer severe symptoms from absorbing "up to 54 milligrams a day of dissolved nicotine through their skin", the equivalent of an average of 50 cigarettes a day. . . .

Companies such as Philip Morris International said they do not own farms in Malawi, but they purchase tobacco from suppliers in the country.

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