Report highlights child labor on US tobacco farms

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — You may have to be at least 18 to buy cigarettes in the U.S., but children as young as 7 are working long hours in fields harvesting nicotine- and pesticide-laced tobacco leaves under sometimes hazardous and sweltering conditions, according to a report released Wednesday by an international rights group.

The Human Rights Watch report details findings from interviews with more than 140 children working on farms in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, where a majority of the country's tobacco is grown. The group acknowledges that most of what it documented is legal under U.S. law but aims to highlight the practice and urge both governments and tobacco companies to take further steps to protect children from the hazardous harvesting of the cash crop that has built businesses, funded cities and influenced cultures.

"The U.S. has failed America's families by not meaningfully protecting child farmworkers from dangers to their health and safety, including on tobacco farms," said Margaret Wurth, children's rights researcher and co-author of the report. "Farming is hard work anyway, but children working on tobacco farms get so sick that they throw up, get covered by pesticides and have no real protective gear."

Children interviewed by the group in 2012 and 2013 reported vomiting, nausea and headaches while working on tobacco farms. The symptoms they reported are consistent with nicotine poisoning often called Green Tobacco Sickness, which occurs when workers absorb nicotine through their skin while handling tobacco plants.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140514/tobacco_farming-children-3f15838f8a.html

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FILE - Farm workers make their way across a field shrouded in fog as they hoe weeds from a burley tobacco crop near Warsaw, Ky., early in this Thursday, July 10, 2008 file photo. You may have to be at least 18 to buy cigarettes in the U.S., but children as young as 7 are working long hours in fields harvesting nicotine- and pesticide-laced tobacco leaves under sometimes hazardous and sweltering conditions, according to a report released Wednesday May 14, 2014 by Human Rights Watch. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File)

[sorefeet]

1. Tobacco is labor intense

I helped one summer when I lived in Kentucky. Absolutely one of the worst if not the worst job I have done in my entire work career of 50 years. Nasty, sticky plant that left a resin film of nicotine and pesticides an you. The heat and humidity was horrible. With big fat green tobacco worms that were gross. I would never ever put a child in those fields or the industry in any way.

[LoisB]

2. Disgusting.

[Faux pas]

3. I'm sure this is part of

the rethuglican dream of America's future. If they can't kill them while they're young, they can use them for cannon fodder later.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Right! That's why gawd provided so many poor people for rich people to use. n/t

[Faux pas]

7. Yeah, there must be something in

the bible about that. lol

[freshwest]

4. I'd read of teenagers ending up in emergency room because of the nicotine poisoning working fields.

That they have children doing this now boggles the mind and I wonder how long it has gone on, perhaps it always did.

The article I read years ago was in the seventies. Young men working between semesters to get extra money for school or family. It focused on an eighteen years old with his picture who had to be treated for Green Tobacco Sickness. At that time there was an emphasis in news on the dangers of tobacco being smoked, not harvest. If one wants to know how harmful any product will be, a look at the workers who make it is the starting point.

In the article, the general assumption would be he worked there voluntarily, but a seven year old can not make that choice. Agricultural practices in the world are abusive. Just because one is not eating meat, doesn't mean one isn't abusing people or the planet. The problems go deeper and they always have as long as we've had agriculture. There is a reason rural youth have fled to the cities and other work for generations. Conditions for those who stay are often not what those in town will put up with as it is basic oligarchy in all its glory in effect there.

If not local citizens, it is migrant labor that will be abused. The vision of the family farm as free and wholesome was a fleeting one. All the illusions will have to be taken away.

[Sunlei]

9. These big farms have a lot of workers who live around the farm, they have families/kids who

are expected to help with harvests. Workers can't complain because their homes are usually rented to them by the Farms owner.

Our Gov. has very weak or no regulations to protect, "all the people" from all the exploitation by Industry/Corps.

[Duppers]

5. 58 yrs ago

I was one of those kids.

[Sunlei]

10. How did you feel after a couple days work during the harvest season?

[Le Taz Hot]

11. Wow.

[Sunlei]

8. the plants nicotine makes anyone exposed to it, pickers feel very sick EVERYDAY from nicotine.

And pesticides that it seems to me all of Big- Ag. doesn't give a crap about exposure to any person on farm or off the farm.

All those kids and any workers are addicted to nicotine big time. Subjected to nicotine overdose, to the point of feeling very sick, daily.