Tobacco making a comeback
In Zimbabwe, crop bounces back amid environmental and child labor concerns
HARARE, Zimbabwe — Africa’s biggest tobacco grower and one of the world’s top exporters of the nicotine leaf, the country of Zimbabwe has opened its selling season for the crop amid pledges to fight deforestation and child labor in response to pressure from rights groups, environmentalists and international buyers.
Tobacco is on a rebound in a nation where production plummeted from a peak of 290,000 tons in 1998 to less than 60,000 tons a decade later following the eviction of several thousand white farmers who accounted for the majority of growers.
In recent years Zimbabwe has rapidly increased the size of its crop, regaining its spot as one of the world’s top five exporters of tobacco. It exported just over 220,000 tons of tobacco in 2021, according to the Tobacco Industry Marketing Board.
This year’s crop is expected to be about 10% or 15% smaller due to unfavorable weather, according to one of the country’s biggest merchants TSL Limited.
Tobacco is one of Zimbabwe’s biggest earners of foreign currency alongside minerals such as gold and funds sent by Zimbabweans living outside the country. Tobacco earned Zimbabwe about $1.2 billion in exports last year and the government would like to see that increase “into a $5 billion industry by 2025,” Agriculture Minister Anxious Musuka said.
The government hopes to encourage an increase in the size of the tobacco crop to 330,000 tons annually by providing more local funding to farmers, Musuka said.
With tobacco’s proven role in causing cancer, international marketers are urging Zimbabwe to avoid any other controversy by producing the crop in ways that don’t harm the environment or use child labor.
The bulk of Zimbabwe’s flue-cured tobacco crop now comes from more than 100,000 small-scale Black farmers, many resettled on formerly white-owned farms. Small-scale farmers produced about 147,000 tons, about 63% of the total crop sold last year, according to the tobacco marketing board.
This massive shift from large-scale commercial farming has changed who does the work producing the crop. The big white-owned commercial farms used to employ scores of full-time workers but now the small farms are mostly family operations that often rely on child labor, say rights activists.
Another problem is that many of the new smaller tobacco growers can’t afford the electricity or coal needed to cure the tobacco leaves so they cut down nearby trees, causing Zimbabwe’s forests to decline by about 15% to 20% annually in recent years, according to researchers.
Under international pressure, Zimbabwe’s tobacco industry is trying to reduce these problems, said Meanwell Gudu, CEO of the tobacco marketing board.
The country has been on “a blitz of afforestation” that includes farmers receiving tree seedlings to establish woodlots in their areas, according to Gudu.
Reducing the use of child labor could be harder because many families have been doing that for generations, some farmers said. Children as young as 5 work in the fields with their parents as part of their normal upbringing, they said.
A 2018 report by Human Rights Watch stated that children on Zimbabwean tobacco farms “work in hazardous conditions, performing tasks that threaten their health and safety or interfere with their education.” The report noted that “child workers are exposed to nicotine and toxic pesticides, and many suffer symptoms consistent with nicotine poisoning.”