Commercial Tobacco Production




smoking Modern commercial tobacco is a profitable commodity. It is the world’s most widely produced non-food crop grown predominantly in the countries of the Third World. Although commercial tobacco is cultivated in over 100 locations around the world, 75 per cent of them are located in developing countries, where

tobacco corporations can use cheap labour of the local population in order to make the highest possible profits. The largest producer is China, which grows more than one third of all commercially-produced tobacco crops, followed by the countries such as Zimbabwe, Turkey, India, and Brazil. The USA and the European Union, however, grow a lot of tobacco crops, too.

The sad fact is that modern tobacco has little to do with that of Native Americans, who were the first to use it in pipes and “cakes” for smoking and chewing. Interestingly enough, despite high consumption of naturally-grown tobacco by the Natives, diseases such as cancer or heart attacks had been virtually unknown in their societies before they became “civilized” by the European newcomers to their continent. From among folks belonging to traditional aboriginal societies populating the Northern American continent before its westernization, the incidence of smoking sometimes had been as high as one hundred percent! Obviously, widely-grown traditional tobacco had not been as harmful as commercially produced and processed tobacco products of the modern world. What has so drastically changed?

Several species of tobacco are native to the American land, the most known and widely cultivated of which are Nicotiana tabacum and Nicotiana rustica. Nicotiana tabacum is grown exclusively for smoking and chewing and accounts for most commercially produced cigarettes, cigars, and other tobacco products for public consumption. Nicotiana rustica has a higher nicotine content, is difficult to grow, and is used primarily for specialized uses, such as the production of insecticides. It is estimated that commercially produced Nicotiana tabacum contains more that 4,000 artificial chemicals and other harmful additives, while Indian, or Sacred, tobacco (grown in the wild) was completely free from them.

Cultivated tobacco is prone to diseases and requires regular applications of herbicides, fertilizers, and pesticides. A tobacco plant grows within the average period of three months and usually undergoes more than 16 different applications of various chemical additives during the growing stage. The soil for tobacco is habitually fumigated by large quantities of methyl bromide, a substance that depletes ozone, in the amounts that reach almost 6 million pounds a year worldwide. It is also known that people involved in growing and processing tobacco on a commercial level are prone to numerous diseases, the most obvious of which is Green Tobacco Sickness, which strikes more than 40 percent of workers handling tobacco leaves during the harvest season. The sickness is caused by the skin absorption of nicotine from raw tobacco leaves and produces such symptoms as weakness, cramps, nausea, and abnormalities in the heart rate and blood pressure. In contrast, Native peoples never cultivated tobacco, but collected the leaves of widely grown tobacco plants in small amounts to be used later in sacred ceremonies as a way to communicate with the spirit world and treat some illnesses. Aboriginals’ consumption of tobacco in their traditional societies always had a ceremonial and spiritual context as opposed to modern habitual smoking with exclusively recreational purposes.

tobacco crop When commercial tobacco is processed, it is passed through heated air and flue-cured, and this curing processing of each ton of tobacco requires about 12 cubic meters of fuel (wood) that is usually derived from cutting down trees, especially in the developing countries. Certainly, the Native Americans would have never harmed the environment, which was always considered sacred in their communities. They lived in total harmony with nature and only harvested naturally grown plants without harming anything alive. Sadly, in the modern world of capitalism and overwhelming industrial production and mindless consumption, tobacco growing already has been responsible for eliminating 200,000 hectares of pristine forests in the countries of the Third World.

Geoffrey Wolf

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Posted on October 27, 2007 
Filed Under Tobacco History

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