Plan International has released a report (August 24, 2009) on working conditions on tobacco plantations in Malawi in southern Africa. The study says that at least 78,000 children are toiling in tobacco fields, but the suspicion is the numbers may be much higher.
Malawi is the world’s fifth biggest tobacco producer and the crop accounts for 70% of export income.
Multinationals Move Tobacco Growing to Africa
Writing about the Plan International study in The Globe and Mail (August 24, 2009). Geoffrey York commented that, “Until recently, much of the North American cigarette industry was getting its tobacco from farmers in southwestern Ontario and North Carolina and similar tobacco belts.”
However, the tobacco industry has moved much of its tobacco growing to Africa where the cost of labour is much lower; the Plan report says that most of the child workers in Malawi are paid barely $5 a month. According to the study, local tobacco farmers don’t benefit from the profits of the multinational tobacco companies and struggle to break even. As a result they look for ways to cut costs and that leads to the use of child labour.
The children told researchers that they had to work “to support themselves, their families, and pay school fees.”
Children Exposed to Nicotine
According to the Plan International report, children working in the tobacco fields of Malawi are being poisoned by nicotine. The doses they are receiving is "the equivalent of 50 cigarettes per day.”
In addition to enduring physical and sexual abuse from plantation owners many of the children are showing signs of Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS). David G. Altman at Wake Forest University School of Medicine wrote in a 1998 paper that GTS occurs when dissolved nicotine is absorbed through the skin from leaves covered in moisture from rain or dew.
Plan says that though is a shortage of research some experts fear exposure in childhood could lead to developmental delays and long-term sickness.
The child workers are giving no protective clothing to reduce their exposure to nicotine.
Green Tobacco Sickness
Dr. Altman described the symptomsof GTS as including "weakness, headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness,abdominal cramps, breathing difficulty, abnormal temperature,pallor, diarrhoea, chills, fluctuations in blood pressure or heartrate, and increased perspiration and salivation." These warning signs were reported by the 44 children who were extensively interviewed for the study.
One child said: “Sometimes it feels like you don’t have enough breath, you don’t have enough oxygen. You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache.”
Pressure on Tobacco Companies to Improve Working Conditions
Plan International is now calling on tobacco companies and plantations to vastly improve working conditions and live up to their own promised corporate responsibility guidelines by scrutinizing their suppliers far more closely. The child advocacy group wants tobacco growers to provide safer working conditions, better pay, and a way for those children who have to work to get an education.
Plan International is also trying to get the government of Malawi to take a more active role in improving the lives of the people caught up in this problem.
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