Mexico’s Tobacco Growers Used as Lobbyists

On 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 Winston 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.

Big Tobacco in the Third World
Similar relationships between farmers and Big Tobacco are repeated in country after country throughout the developing world—where the industry is seeing impressive revenue growth. British American Tobacco said last year that “some two-thirds of our revenue comes from developing markets.”
One of the industry’s strongest political avatars in developing nations has been the International Tobacco Growers Association. It works in Mexico through local farmers associations. And around the world, ITGA activities mirror those of grower groups here.
In November, tobacco growers protested in Punta del Este, Uruguay, outside a meeting of WHO officials and tobacco-control delegates from around the globe who had gathered to discuss the progress of smoking restrictions and excise tax initiatives. The growers were there to rally against a proposal to ban burley tobacco, used to make flavored cigarettes.
ITGA organized the Uruguay protest. The group says that in 22 countries it represents 85 percent of the world’s tobacco producers. On its website ITGA says it promotes empowerment, understanding and advocacy for tobacco growers and tobacco growing nations around the globe. But the website doesn’t say that ITGA is a Big Tobacco brainchild.
ITGA was formed and funded through a historically tobacco industry-driven research entity, the International Tobacco Information Center, according to internal tobacco corporate documents made available after lawsuits against the industry in the U.S.
One of the benefits of ITGA, listed in a 1988 proposal by John Bloxcidge of INFOTAB, was that the group “could ‘front’ for our third world lobby activities at WHO and gain support from nations hostile to (multinational corporations).”
Former ITGA President Roger Quarles doesn’t deny the group is partially funded by the industry.
“But there’s nothing sinister about it,” he said in an interview with ICIJ. “The companies barely give us enough to get our bills paid. We don’t share in the profit of cigarettes. ”
Tobacco is grown in more than 100 countries. Mexico has declined into a mid-level player, but its leaf still spices the mix in cigarettes manufactured here and abroad.
There’s still abundant consumer demand for tobacco in Mexico: About 16 percent of Mexican adults still smoke, and a growing number of teenagers have tried cigarettes at least once. Because of that, the Mexican public health ministry estimates the country spends $5.7 billion a year providing medical care for tobacco-related illnesses. An estimated 60,000 tobacco-related deaths are reported each year in Mexico.

A rich tobacco tradition
Mexico is also home to the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helú, who is Latin America’s biggest tobacco baron, with a seat on the Philip Morris International board of directors and a stake in the company’s Mexican brands.

Philip Morris maker of LM cigarettes and British American Tobacco producer of Pall Mall cigarettes dominate the cigarette market in Mexico. They´ve been involved in farm production since the late 1990s after the government privatized national tobacco production. BAT eventually purchased Cigarrera La Moderna and Philip Morris increased its shares in Slim’s Cigatam. Other foreign companies now produce tobacco for cigarettes sold abroad.
But in Amapa, in Nayarit state — this was once the center of the Mexican tobacco-farming business— BAT has moved out of its large building and into a smaller office on the outskirts of town. The U.S.-based tobacco leaf vendor Alliance One closed its offices two years ago and liquidated its local assets. A supermarket is being built on land where another company’s reception center was once located.