Tobacco.org

Water, tobacco, and global inequalities  

These photographs are used to illustrate the public health impact of lack of water and global inequalities... For Mozambique, one of the world's poorest countries and at the time devastated by the effects of a US and South African backed guerrilla war the impact was immense... Throughout the two years that I lived and worked in central Mozambique I saw trees collapse because of the drought and I never saw maize grow successfully. I did however see fields full of healthy growing tobacco on a multinational owned tobacco farm. Figure 4 shows tobacco drying in one of the barns of the tobacco farm. The most appalling image I have in my mind is of poor Mozambicans grappling on hands and knees in the dust and dirt trying to pick up individual kernels of corn that had fallen from the backs of aid lorries with slogans such as "Jesus Alive" on their sides. Behind them were the green fields of growing tobacco and passing them also on the track the tankers of water being imported to grow the deadly weed.

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