ITGA Leaf Perspectives

Source from:  TJI 05/09/2012

Antonio Abrunhosa, Chief Executive of the International Tobacco Growers Association (ITGA) on the inability of Tobacco Control to come up with viable alternatives to growing tobacco. In its headquarters in the building of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva, they have been discussing issues related with tobacco consumption and, lately, with tobacco production. The latter is dealt mainly by articles 17 (alternatives to tobacco growing) and 18 (environmental impact of tobacco growing). It must be remembered that article 17 was created originally, in the negotiations of the Framework Convention of Tobacco Control, with the idea that WHO would help Governments to find and fund economically viable alternatives to tobacco growing. Unhappily, the idea got lost in translation, in the last five years of meetings of that Working Group. One of the reasons was that, after all these years and millions of dollars spent with those meetings all over the world, not one study, I repeat, one, has come out with sound research on any economically viable alternative to tobacco, with the dimension of the tobacco crop, in one relevant producing country or region. In their last discussions they came to some brave conclusions that, not by chance, had been found by tobacco growers organisations a long time ago. To name some: The alternatives to tobacco growing, to be viable, need to be more profitable than tobacco, have a sufficient market and a supporting infrastructure; The research for those alternatives will take many years and will need field trials, economic studies and will require adequate resources; That research will be impossible or irrelevant without the participation of tobacco growers; The environmental impact of tobacco has to be compared with the alternative crops' impact. Now, based on those conclusions, any measures related with the replacement of tobacco, as a cash crop done by tens of millions of farmers and workers in more than a hundred countries, should, obviously, lead to a long period of research and consultation with growers' organisations, the only ones who know the successful cases of diversification with tobacco. But what is obvious to any mortal is not obvious to health experts from the 27 countries in the Working Group. In spite of pondered objections by some of the few agriculture experts who attend those meetings, the FCTC is pushing ahead with measures to achieve what they consider an attainable objective, even if a lot of sensible people consider it a silly one: to reduce global tobacco consumption by decreasing production in the countries that ratified the FCTC (note: USA, Argentina, Zimbabwe and Malawi did not). With that aim, the FCTC wants Governments to limit or reduce the area planted with tobacco; curtail subsidies and support mechanisms for tobacco growers; remove minimum support prices; control tobacco leaf prices and any technological support; stop leaf auctions; dismantle bodies promoting tobacco and create environmental regulation that would discriminate tobacco among agriculture crops. In brief, the FCTC wants to destroy the livelihoods of tens of millions of tobacco farmers and workers without proposing any alternative way of living and without having any positive impact on health, as consumption will never go down in Country A because production went down in Country B. Let's hope that some agricultural experts, with the help of some millions of growers and their organisations, will be able to put some common sense into this irresponsible debate. Enditem