Big Tobacco in Malawi

Tim Newman, Campaigns Assistant, International Labor Rights Forum

Everyone knows that smoking cigarettes is bad for your health, but did you know that it also harms children and workers involved in growing tobacco?  A new article by Pilirani Semu-Banda published by our friends at CorpWatch focuses on the ongoing problem of child labor in tobacco fields in Malawi. 

As Semu-Banda writes,

Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial  tobacco estate in Malawi's northern region. The farms sell their produce on the country's auction floors directly to international corporations including Limbe Leaf Tobacco, majority owned by the Swiss-registered Continental Tobacco Company and U.S.-based Alliance One Tobacco...

Kirana was eight years old when he first went to work in the fields. Estate owners transported him and his parents from their home village, Mulanje, along with 45 other families. The truck journey covered more than 1,000 kilometers and ended in the tobacco fields in Rumphi in northern Malawi.            

Kirana's mother, Jane Kapito, 45, says the family left home seeking a better life. “Four years later, my whole family is still struggling with poverty. My son has to work as hard as everyone else if we have to afford the basic necessities. The money that my husband and I receive from the tobacco estate is not enough,” she says.            

Now 12, Kirana has never been to school. For the past six months, his health has been failing and he can no longer work as hard as he used to. His mother says her little boy is malnourished and therefore contracts different infections easily. The family often goes without a proper meal for up to three days.

       

To read the full article and find out more about the tobacco industry's response, click here.

CorpWatch has also launched a great new website called Crocodyl.  It's a wikispace for collaborative research on corporations.  Contributors can add research to corporate profiles so that people around the world can easily access information about the behavior of corporations around the world.  Check it out and get involved! 

Comments

[crocodyl]

One of the companies mentioned in the article is here on Crocodyl:

http://crocodyl.org/wiki/alliance_one_international

We started a stub when the CorpWatch.org profile was put up, contributions are welcome!