Marty Otañez Assistant Professor, Anthropology Department, University of Colorado, Denver, USA
Abstract
What does it mean to be a tobacco farmer? What is the tobacco farm worker experience? Increasingly tobacco control advocates and policy makers struggle with these questions. Traditional approaches to address the concerns focus on child labor, debt servitude, green tobacco sickness and deforestation.
Tobacco value chain and human rights based approaches to tobacco control offer compelling ways to understand how cigarette manufacturers and leaf buying companies harm tobacco households. In fact, individuals concerned with corporate accountability and living earnings issues associated with tobacco growing have come to understand the culture of global tobacco control and its priority to protect health in different ways. As experiences of tobacco farmers and farm workers are discussed, it becomes clear that households who devote their lives to tobacco growing and who wish to cultivate a mix of non-tobacco crops lack economic and political capital to exit tobacco farming.
By highlighting the political anthropology of tobacco leaf production, I reveal tobacco industry agricultural exploitation and inspire a continued interest in tobacco control that supports labor rights and alternative livelihoods for tobacco farmers and farm workers.
Source of funding: None
Declaration of interest: International Labor Rights Forum, Washington, D.C.
