The Anthropology of Labor Unions

9: The Tobacco Trap: Obstacles to Trade Unionism in Malawi

189 Based on ethnographic data on tobacco farmworkers and trade unionists in Malawi, this chapter analyzes child labor and labor organizing in Malawi’s tobacco sector. Malawi is economically reliant on tobacco growing and experiences high levels of child labor on tobacco farms. Men and women with little or no access to land or wage work agree to contracts with farm owners to grow and sell tobacco on land the owners provide to them. Black Malawians own virtually all of the country’s tobacco farms and sell at auctions to U.S.-based leaf-buying companies that have prearranged contracts with Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, and other global cigarette manufacturers. Men and women send their children to the fields instead of to school so they can cultivate enough leaf to satisfy contracts. Children and their parents employed in tobacco farming become trapped in a downward cycle of poverty as tobacco farm owners and tobacco companies earn profits from leaf produced with child labor. Union organizers in Malawi struggle to eliminate child labor and improve the livelihoods of tobacco farmworkers. However, organizers encounter obstacles in the global political economy of tobacco, where the Malawian n i n e Marty Otañez TheTobaccoTrap: Obstacles toTrade Unionism in Malawi M a rt y Ota ñ e z 190 government promotes tobacco growing and health policy-makers seek to decrease it. Both sides present daunting challenges to labor organizers. Political Economy of Tobacco in Malawi Beginning in 1981, structural adjustment programs (renamed Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers in 2000) involved policies to promote tobacco and other cash crops to achieve economic growth and ensure that Malawi repays its debts to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (International Monetary Fund 2007; Magalasi 2006; World Bank 2006a, 2006b). Malawi derives 70 percent of its foreign earnings from tobacco, making it the most tobacco-dependent economy in the world (International Monetary Fund 2007). Nearly 3 percent of Malawi’s arable land (2.8 percent; 301,467 acres) is devoted to growing tobacco (Table 9.1) (Mackay and Eriksen 2006). With about 1.5 million jobs, tobacco is the second largest sector of the economy, after the civil service. Between 1990 and 1995, tobacco accounted for 20 percent of deforestation in Malawi (Geist 1999). Furthermore, pesticide and fertilizer use on the country’s tobacco crop depletes nutrients from soils, pollutes water tables, and erodes landscapes. Tobacco growing thrives alongside poverty in Malawi. Of Malawi’s population of 13.2 million, 65.3 percent live at or below the national poverty line ($1.50 U.S. income per day) (United Nations Development Program 2008), life expectancy at birth is 39.8 years, 14 percent are infected with HIV/AIDs (one of the highest rates in the world) (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS 2006; World Health Organization 2006b), 64 percent of adults are literate, the per capita GDP is $161 U.S., and 83 percent live in rural areas (United Nations Development Program 2008). Desperate to survive, Malawians sell their labor on tobacco farms but continue to fall deeper into poverty. Philip Morris and other cigarette manufacturers save $10 million U.S. per year in production costs because the 78,000 children who work growing tobacco are not paid the adult minimum agricultural wage (Mwasikakata 2003; Otañez 2004). Few consumers in the United States and other global markets where Marlboro, Camel, and other American-blend cigarette brands are sold know that men, women, and children in Malawi who earn little or no money and suffer from chronic poverty grow the tobacco contained in many of those cigarettes. T h e To b a c c o T r a p 191 While smokers may be unfamiliar with the people who cultivated the tobacco in their cigarettes, consumers are increasingly aware of the health effects of smoking. Tobacco is the most common preventable cause of death worldwide and kills nearly 5 million people each year (Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids 2007). Tobacco farmers and their trade unions in Malawi and other developing countries grow a toxic crop with few allies to help them increase labor rights or make tobacco an economically sustainable crop (Clay 2004). Farmworkers and union organizers with the Tobacco Tenants and Allied Workers Union of Malawi (TOTAWUM), the national union of tobacco farm workers, are inextricably tied to tobacco industry corporate social responsibility programs and campaigns to reduce global tobacco use. Table...