Human Goods

Multinational tobacco giants have been long-vilified for marketing cancer-causing cigarettes for consumption by children in Europe and the United States, and increasingly in the developing world. But even as public outrage has slightly softened the aggressive marketing agendas in the West (or at least rendered them less overt), less attention has been paid to the exploitation of children occurring at the other end of the chain– in the vast fields of the developing world’s tobacco-producing countries.

In one more example of the feverish race-to-the-bottom mania of global production, 75% of production of tobacco now occurs in developing countries, a report by the NGO Plan recently revealed. One of them is Malawi, whose biggest export is tobacco.

As with most global outsourcing of jobs, the report points out that supposed efforts to bolster local economies through the creation of employment and its attendant benefits do not always achieve those results.

When industry becomes less cost-effective at home due to the obligations of fair wages and occupational safety, it is cheaper to contract the production of goods to countries with less regulated labor laws.  This often involves the exploitation of children and other human rights violations, as small contractors struggle to make a profit.  Plan reports:

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 labor costs, children in Malawi receive just 17 U.S. cents for 12 hours of unrelenting work.

Imagining today’s black African children, as young as five years old, sweating in fields to bring cheaper tobacco to the mouths of the world’s wealthier citizens is easily reminiscent of classic American slavery in the Old South.  The corporations and the profits are bigger, but according to the report, the presence of disease, sexual and physical abuse from supervisors, and the denial of wages remains the same– the modern global economy just removes its rancor from immediately under our noses.

One of the consequences of the exploitation is Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS), a poisoning contracted by laborers who cultivate and harvest tobacco.  “On humid days,” Plan reports, “the average field worker may be exposed to as much as 54 mg of dissolved nicotine — the equivalent to more than 50 average cigarettes.”

Symptoms of GTS suffered by Malawi’s child laborers include nausea, vomiting, severe weakness, abdominal cramping, chills, increased sweating, salivation and difficulty breathing.  But more sobering is the long-term effects of nicotine exposure in children, revealed by Neal Benowitz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco:

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.

(photo: BBC News)

Long-lasting changes in brain structure???

Reasons for being compelled to work, given by the 44 children Plan interviewed (out of Malawi’s conservatively estimated 78,000 children working on tobacco farms), include:

• poverty at home
• lack of food and clothes
• the need to fix family houses
• the need for fertilizer for the family farm

Nevertheless, most of the children interviewed were orphans, not surprisingly since increased vulnerability tends to lead to acceptance of any kind of work, even when it is exploitative.

In many cases, supervisors wield extra power over female children, coercing them into sex in exchange for food or money– or even as a penalty for arriving late to work.  Male children reported feeling angry at their own powerlessness to protect girls, another issue strongly evocative of tobacco-slavery in the Old South.  Crowning the whole dehumanizing experience is the social stigmatization that occurs in the community, as many child tobacco laborers are considered “unwashed” and “stupid” because they do not attend school.

The report shows that many of the children are willing to work as long as the hours are shorter, the wages fairer, and the type of work more appropriate to their smaller body size.

Plan is now pressuring both tobacco companies to take responsibility for the violations that occur at the lowest levels of their production chains, as well as the Malawi government to enforce laws that protect children from exploitative labor.

Americans often complain of the escalating cigarette prices (largely due to increased local and state sales taxes), but, as with any consumed product, it’s good to reflect a moment on the real human price of what we’re consuming before we light up.

Although there are campaigns to make officially labeled fair trade tobacco available to smokers, these efforts have not yet been successful.

For more images, check out the BBC’s slideshow on the subject.