World No Tobacco Day: Organizations warn of tobacco harm

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High-quality land in poorer countries is increasingly being used to grow tobacco, leaving less land available for growing food, the Lung League and the Working Group on Tobacco Prevention in Switzerland complained in a statement Tuesday on the occasion of this year’s World No Tobacco Day.

The choice of alternative crops is limited because there are no strong, safe markets compared to the tobacco sector and the authorities do not support the abandonment of tobacco cultivation.

Tobacco cultivation and the chemicals used also polluted the soil. This is said to extract important nutrients for productive agriculture from the soil. Because tobacco is a labor-intensive crop that takes up to nine months to mature, it is difficult for small farms to grow food in the same year.

In Switzerland itself, the cultivation of the economically unprofitable and environmentally harmful tropical tobacco plant is declining, reports the Longliga and Tobacco Prevention. At the same time, 36 billion cigarettes are produced annually with the imported tobacco, three-quarters of which are exported around the world.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), tobacco is responsible for eight million deaths each year. Nevertheless, governments around the world are spending millions to support tobacco plantations, the WHO had criticized as recently as Friday.

Instead of tobacco, plants should be grown to feed the world’s population, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva. Tobacco plants grow on 3.2 million hectares in 124 countries. In their calculations, the Longliga and Tobacco Prevention Switzerland even arrive at 4.3 million hectares, an area at least as large as Switzerland.

World No Tobacco Day was declared by the WHO on May 31, 1987 and has had a different motto every year since then. The current one is: food instead of tobacco.

(SDA)

Source: Blick