TOBACCO FARMING IN INDIA AND CHINA (India, China, 2009-2010)
Things are going well for the tobacco industry in the two leading producers, China and India. Des-pite the crisis the profits and share prices are rising for firms like Philip Morris and British Ameri-can Tobacco. In China tobacco is the primary force driving economic growth in Yunnan province. The rural areas where 87 % of the population live however see few benefits from this. At the most, a tobacco farmer in Yunnan earns about a quarter of what a regular farmer does. Yet thousands of hectares of agricultural land, where vegetables were once grown, are devoted to tobacco production. The same is true for India, where 850,000 often underpaid workers labour in 100,000 hectares of tobacco fields. It is evidence of the power of an industry that is responsible for child labour, pollu-tion and exploitation.
