“We have a holistic approach to tobacco control, which goes all the way from the seedbed to the cigarette butt,” says Sonja von Eichborn, Director of the Unfairtobacco project. She explains how the project, founded by Blue21 – a nongovernmental organization based in Germany, aims to show how the tobacco industry harms farmers, consumers and the environment.
“It’s the notion of injustice that’s at the heart of our work. When we organize workshops in schools, we find that most students know that smoking isn’t healthy, but they don’t know where the product, tobacco, comes from. They are astonished to find that tobacco use is not only a health issue.”
More than 90% of the world’s tobacco is grown in low- and middle-income countries, mostly by smallholder farmers who need to use unpaid family labour to make ends meet, leading to child labour. Tobacco growing also contributes to social injustices including food insecurity, environmental damage and climate change.
“Tobacco has implications for humans everywhere and for the environment, from the use of pesticides and child labour in tobacco growing, to the injustice of passive smoking,” explains Sonja. “We support the advocacy work of WHO on funding alternative livelihoods because that is a big problem that governments do not commit to.”
Supporting alternatives
Tobacco farmers are not the enemy, but the weakest actor in the tobacco trade system, and they need support from governments and rich countries to step away from growing tobacco, Sonja continues. “The problem is that countries need to export things and tobacco generates a lot of revenue. Farmers would need to change to something which can be exported. And that is a difficult thing.”
There have been steps towards this and projects which are working well, Sonja points out, but there are many obstacles. One of them is the need for poor countries to receive export revenues to pay off national debt, and another is the interference of the tobacco industry. Then, there is the issue of sustainability.
“Tobacco can’t be eaten in an emergency. It’s not sustainable for the community where it is grown,” Sonja emphasizes. “If you grow organic foods, which are sold locally, then this could be sustainable, if people can buy the food, or if it can be sold to a school feeding programme for example, but it will not be economically sustainable for a whole country.”
In response to these challenges, and together with international partners, Unfairtobacco initiated the Cape Town Declaration on Human Rights and a Tobacco-free World, to which more than 150 organizations have signed up. Unfairtobacco also lend support to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), in which governments are asked to support alternatives to tobacco farming.
Sustainability and change
“You must replace tobacco because it has a huge carbon footprint. It uses a lot of water, it has real environmental problems,” Sonja insists. “If we look at the carbon footprint of the cigarette industry, we see 78% of carbon emissions occur in tobacco growing and curing, not in factories or distribution, but through pesticide use and cutting down and burning forests for fuel.”
However, replacing one monoculture with another, such as growing soybeans for feed in poultry farming, does not solve the most important question for tobacco alternatives: is it sustainable – for the environment, for the economy, for the society or community where it is grown? Is it resilient to the effects of climate change?
“Farmers in rich countries can use their land for solar panels,” Sonja points out, but she says the level of investment needed is too high for a smallholder with only a hectare of arable land. “This is why governments need to support farmers financially to diversify,” she insists, noting also that tobacco farming is labour-intensive, and people cannot innovate if they are tired and sick.
Sonja is adamant that countries which are champions of tobacco control need to support the fight in other countries. As an organization, Unfairtobacco collate articles to showcase different alternative projects underway around the globe. Their map is intended as a collection of ideas and options, rather than as a research database, she says. “I would like to see governments investing in ideas, saying ‘Okay, let’s see if this works’ and, if so, making an idea accessible to other countries where tobacco farmers need it most for their livelihood.”
“We try to get the message across here in Germany that the things we use in our lives have a footprint elsewhere in the world, and that we need to change our way of living to support a change in other countries.”