Tobacco farmers in southern Africa are accustomed to excessive rains, a sporadic supply of fertilisers, and crop pests and disease, but a new threat to their livelihoods has been emerging in recent years – the anti-smoking lobby.

Growing global concern about the health risks of smoking threatens not only their livelihoods, but also the economies of countries for which tobacco is a major source of foreign exchange.

Zimbabwe – Africa's biggest producer of tobacco, with 180,000 metric tonnes produced in 2004 – has been affected, as has Mozambique which produced 9,500 metric tonnes last year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. In Malawi, declining tobacco prices last year led to some farmers hiding materials like plastics among their tobacco leaves in order to cheat potential buyers.

Malawi's acting High Commissioner in Zambia, Protasii Kanyengambeta, was reported in the 2004 October, 7 edition of the Zambian newspaper The Post, to have said that Malawi's economy has greatly been affected because of declining export revenue generated by its principal crop, and that the international anti-tobacco lobby is to blame.

A key player in that lobby is the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA), an international coalition of non-governmental organisations that has been lobbying countries to ratify the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

Initiated by the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization, the FCTC is the first treaty aimed at spurring global action to curtail the current epidemic of tobacco-related diseases.

According to the Framework Convention Alliance, tobacco is the single largest preventable cause of premature death and disease, killing four million people each year. Globally, says the FCA, more than 11 million people have died from tobacco- related illness since FCTC negotiations began in October 1999.

The FCTC aims to protect present and future generations from not only these devastating health impacts but also the social and environmental consequences of tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke. One way it aims to do this is by eliminating tobacco advertising.

Just as a mosquito carries malaria, so advertising acts as a 'vector' for tobacco-related disease, says the FCTC, and banning it could save millions of lives. In 1990, the World Health Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution on tobacco urging “progressive restriction” and concerted action to eliminate eventually all direct and indirect advertising, promotion and sponsorship concerning tobacco.

As more research on the health impacts of smoking emerge, public perceptions to smoking are changing, and in developed nations the habit is even being legislated against. In parts of the United States and Europe, for example, smoking is no longer permitted in public places and restrictions on cigarette advertising are becoming stricter.

“It is like we are being robbed of our sweat despite working for almost close to six months to ensure that the crop is ready for the market," said Clement Mandevu, a tobacco farmer from Malawi's central district of Dowa. "The prices we are getting cannot even offset the cost of inputs that we invest during production.”

On a number of occasions last year, tobacco sales were halted due to unsatisfactory prices offered by commercial buyers, prices that went as low as 40 cents per kilogram. This lead to protests by farmers at the auction floors in Blantyre and Lilongwe.

Mandevu said that on one day during the last selling season on 10 September, 2004, he was offered as little as 80 cents per kilogram for all the eight bales he had on sale. Under normal circumstances, the best prices offered range from one to two dollars per kilogram. He thinks that if tobacco prices continue to fall, farmers' appetite for growing the crop will also diminish.

If that were to happen, there could be big implications for countries like Malawi that rely heavily on tobacco exports. Facing that possibility, Malawi's president Bingu wa Mutharika recently urged farmers to consider growing other crops, such as cotton, as an alternative to tobacco.

He believes cotton has the potential to turn around the economy of the country through job creation. The emerging international market in the U.S. under the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) could also boost foreign exchange earnings and oil production after processing cotton seeds, among other things.

Malawi's agricultural diversification is already underway with not only cotton but tea, sugar and cassava cultivation taking off, as tea is the second cash crop after tobacco, but as Protasii Kanyengambeta told The Post, "Malawi's economy solely depends on agriculture and we live at the mercy of nature; when the weather is kind we are happy, when the weather is bad we get worried."

Andrew Watson, an environmentalist and former team leader working for Community Partnerships for Sustainable Natural Resource Management in Malawi (COMPASS), says another alternative for the country is to develop ecotourism.

In his report entitled “Opportunities for Sustainable Financing of Community–based natural resource management in Malawi", Watson says ecotourism and related industries are expected to generate close to US$27 billion per year by 2010 and over 30 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

“Malawi, with its cultural, ecological and biological diversity, and scenic beauty should be poised to make the most of the opportunity,” said Watson in the report. “At present, however, lack of economic stability and lack of investment incentives severely constrain growth.”

One person who seems unfazed by concerns that the anti-smoking lobby poses a threat to Malawi is Dr Godfrey Chapola, general manager of Malawi's Tobacco Control Commission, a state institution that controls and regulates the tobacco trade in Malawi.

Asked to comment, Chapola brushed aside fears that the green gold which in recent years has earned the country millions of dollars as a star performer in this part of Africa faces an uncertain future.

"There are emerging markets in South-East Asia," says Chapola. “People are smoking tobacco worldwide and consumption is still going on."