Jump to full article: The Independent Online (IOL) (za), 2008-11-21
Author: Kerry Cullinan
Intro: Most African farmers grow tobacco because they are poor and lack alternative ways to earn a living, but with encouragement, many Tanzanian farmers are giving the killer crop the cold-shoulder.
This is according to Lutgard Kagaruki, from the Tanzania Tobacco Control Forum, who addressed a panel at the World Health Organisation's tobacco control conference in Durban this week.
Tanzania is the second biggest grower of tobacco in Africa after Malawi, but many tobacco farmers were "enslaved in permanent debt to the tobacco companies" and wanted to get out, said Kagaruki. . . .
While tobacco is Tanzania's second biggest foreign exchange earner, bringing about $55,5-million into the country in 2003/4, one of the country's cancer institutes, the Ocean Road Cancer Institute, reported spending $30-million treating smoking-related cancers during the same period.
However, Dr Yusuf Salojee, from South Africa's National Council Against Smoking, warned that finding alternative livelihoods for farmers does not work as a tobacco control measure.
"With the collapse of Zimbabwe's tobacco farms after land seizures, all that happened was that Tanzania, Zambia and even Mozambique started to grow more tobacco," he told the conference.
"It does not reduce tobacco demand, but rather shifts supply to another country."
Daniel Sibetchem, from Cameroon's health ministry, said there was a worrying increase in smoking among his country's young people, with 44 percent of schoolchildren having tried tobacco.
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