Checking Tobacco Use in China

In China, 350 million people smoke. Each year, 1 million die from smoking. Many more become disabled. Approximately 20 million Chinese farmers produce the world's largest share of tobacco, nearly 40 percent of the global supply. What is the key to cutting the number of deaths and smoking-related health problems? Convince Chinese farmers to grow some other crop. Virginia Li, a professor of community health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, set out to do just that. She contacted local Chinese agriculture officials in Yunnan Province, where Asia's largest cigarette manufacturer is located. Li and her local partners designed a tobacco crop–substitution project, the core of which is a farmer-led, for-profit enterprise. The farmers, many of whom are not formally educated, were able to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to substitute food crops, including fruits and vegetables, for tobacco. By doing that, their annual income increased between 21 percent and 110 percent per acre of land, and the amount of tobacco being grown was reduced. A report on the project appears in the current online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. In 2003, the World Health Organization highlighted the need to provide "support for economically viable alternative" activities for tobacco workers, growers and sellers. China was among the 192 WHO member nations that signed the organization's landmark international treaty, declaring its commitment to tobacco control. It was a milestone choice for a country in which approximately 20 million households and 100 million people depend on tobacco cultivation, manufacturing and sales for their livelihood. Asia's biggest cigarette manufacturer, the Hongta Group, is located in southwest China's Yunnan Province, in a tobacco-growing municipality called Yuxi. Yunnan is famous for its tobacco, and the province's choicest farmland is committed to the plant. Tobacco production has elevated Yuxi's economy to first in the province, where more than 600 million mu of farmland produce tobacco (one mu equals about one-fourth of a Western acre). The average Chinese farmer owns about one mu of land, and a family may own three to seven mu.