[Farm worker at Whiteside Farm in Marondera harvesting tobacco]
[Farm workers loading tobacco leaves onto truck]
[Truck driving away, carrying tobacco]
[Tobacco leaves being unloaded and treated]
[Tobacco leaves being hung up in barn by workers]
Dr. Vinayak Mohan Prasad (interview): “The largest growers of tobacco continue to be China, India, Brazil. But growing of tobacco has increased many fold in Africa in the last couple of years. Big ones are Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia and to some extent Uganda, Kenya and other eastern African countries. And then on the western side is Cote d’Ivoire, which is also a big grower of tobacco. Down south is Mozambique. And some tobacco plants are grown in Angola and South Africa. So, it’s nearly 124 countries in the world that grow some form of tobacco.”
[Workers rolling cigars in factory]
[Women factory workers smoking cigar]
[Tobacco buyers in face masks inside tobacco auction floors]
Dr. Vinayak Mohan Prasad (interview): “There are countries now which are requesting for food because of the various crises. The access to food is limited and many of these countries are well endowed with enough land – fertile land, water to grow food for many other countries. And so it’s ironic that they are ending up importing food from other countries.”
[Farmers grading and sorting tobacco]
[Car with tobacco bale on the roof driving into the Sales Floor compound]
[Tobacco auction floor]
Dr. Vinayak Mohan Prasad (interview): “There are more than 350 million people having hunger and food insecurity issues, and many of the countries where these issues are a concern are also big tobacco growing economies. In Africa, for example, in the last 15 years. The growing of tobacco has gone up by nearly 20%.”
[Tobacco farmer, Luis Carlos Marrero walking towards his tobacco drying shed]
[Tourists buying cigars in store]
Dr. Vinayak Mohan Prasad (interview): “The industrial tactics, tobacco industry tactics to push tobacco farming as economically viable, most profitable crop. And then leading to countries providing millions of dollars of subsidies; to promote tobacco. So, the farmer gets into a poverty trap after some time. The government is into subsidies and the onus understanding is that these crops are good for the economy. And, it has multiple problems. Tobacco growing leads to not only harming the environment, it leads to deforestation. 5% of deforestation is just because of tobacco growing. More than 1 million children are in the farm because tobacco requires a lot of labour. Nearly 9-10 months of working in the field, women and children get sucked into the farms. So, all of that health effects, environmental effects and an erroneous understanding that tobacco growing is actually very remunerative it but it’s not. So we want to spotlight all this.”
[Cigarette dealers on a street]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.