WHO: Stop Tobacco Farming, Grow Food Instead

In conjunction with World No Tobacco Day, WHO launched a new campaign encouraging governments to end tobacco growing subsidies and use the savings to support farmers to switch to more sustainable crops that enhance food security and nutrition.

In a new report, WHO said 349 million people are facing acute food insecurity, many of them in some 30 countries on the African continent, where tobacco cultivation has increased by 15 percent in the last decade.

WHO also noted that nine of the 10 largest tobacco cultivators are low and middle-income countries. Tobacco farming compounds these countries’ food security challenges by taking up arable land.

It further explained that the environment and the communities which rely on it also suffer, as the crop’s expansion drives deforestation, contamination of water sources and soil degradation.

In the same context, Dr. Rüdiger Krech, WHO’s Director for Health Promotion, warned that tobacco’s economic importance is a “myth that we urgently need to dispel”.

Krech revealed that the crop contributes less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in most tobacco-growing countries, and that the profits go to the world’s major cigarette-makers, while farmers struggle under the burden of debt contracted with the tobacco companies.

“The message to smokers is, think twice”, Dr. Krech concluded.