Jump to full article: Times Of London (uk), 2009-11-15
Author: Dan McDougall in Lilongwe
Intro: 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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