Mexico's tobacco growers used as lobbyists

In October, in chaotic Mexico City, a small army of protestors, sporting placards and shouting into bullhorns, worsened the usual traffic snarl around San Lazaro, the nation’s congressional office complex. Television news accounts showed screaming-mad tobacco farmers, some of whom had boarded buses and traveled 500 miles to warn federal legislators that new taxes on cigarettes would put them out of business.

Inside, lawmakers were in a tug-of-war over a landmark excise tax law that eventually added about 50 cents to a pack of cigarettes and—anti-tobacco activists hoped—would make tobacco less attractive to consumers.

It was not the first time these farmers had traveled far to protest in Mexico. Like tobacco growers around the world, Mexican campesinos—farmers and farmworkers—for years have been deployed to send a message to the public and politicians: Jobs are at stake in the effort by public health advocates to eliminate tobacco ads and limit smoking.

As the global fight over smokers moves from the United States and other countries where tobacco consumption is on the decline, Big Tobacco has drawn a line around developing nations that account for an increasingly important share of their revenues.

From Jakarta in Indonesia to Mexico City, farmers have been reliable street-level lobbyists in the industry’s fight against smoking limits. Farmers say they’re defending their jobs, even though experts insist that the buying habits of multinational companies have more impact on the fortunes of growers than anti-tobacco rules designed by the World Health Organization and public health officials who seek to shrink the human and fiscal costs of tobacco-related disease.

Between 2005 and 2030, 135.1 million people will have died worldwide in developing nations because of smoking-related illness, according to the World Lung Foundation. Tobacco consumption is the globe’s leading preventable cause of death.

In Mexico “the anti-tobacco campaigns didn’t hit farmers as hard as the companies’ global strategies have,” said Javier Castellón, a senator representing western Mexico’s Nayarit state, a swath of humid terrain once known as the Gold Coast because of the value of its tobacco crops.

In Mexico City protests in recent years, farmers have been vocal and proud to stand up for their business, even if some who attended the marches said they'd received stipends for doing so.

In interviews with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, farmers in Nayarit state recalled getting about $20 a day and restaurant and hotel stipends for trips to the nation’s capital. "Many of the ‘farmers’ there were not ,” said one grower, who asked that his name not be used because he fears economic reprisal from tobacco companies.