Labor Costs a Concern for Tobacco Growers

Source from:  THE ASSOCIATED PRESS RALEIGH 02/05/2006

The increasing cost of immigrant field workers was the top concern of tobacco growers at an otherwise upbeat annual meeting of the state's tobacco growers yesterday. "The death of tobacco in North Carolina has been greatly exaggerated," state Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler told a few hundred people attending the Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina. The topic of the trade group's annual meeting was survival in a post-buyout tobacco market, but the prevailing attitude was that the worst had come. Banks and financial planners pitched their services to growers, and tobacco seed salesmen said that their sales suggested a big jump in production this year. Some growers have taken payments from cigarette-makers and a federal buyout, paid off debts and retired. Others have expanded. "Fewer growers will be around, but they will grow more pounds on more acreage," said Sam Crews, the group's outgoing president. North Carolina tobacco farmers last fall divided nearly $400 million in the first of 10 annual installments from the federal government's $9.6 billion buyout ending the Depression-era system of tobacco price supports and quotas. Starting last year, farmers were allowed to sell as much of the leaf as they could grow at whatever price they could get to whomever would buy it. The average price for flue-cured tobacco was a better-than-expected $1.55 to $1.60 a pound under contracts with cigarette-makers, said Blake Brown, an agricultural economist at N.C. State University. Production is expected to increase by about a third this year, he said. But the cost of legally employing immigrant guest workers is climbing, growers said. The fee to process visas and transport workers is nearly doubling to $900 for each worker, and the hourly wage is kicking up 30 cents to $8.58, said Faylene Whitaker, whose family grows about 140 acres of tobacco in Guilford County. The association's top resolutions included asking Congress to revise the H2-A guest-worker program to make temporary visas for laborers easier and cheaper. Enditem