Malawi child tobacco pickers’ ‘50-a-day habit’

Children employed as tobacco pickers in Malawi are being regularly exposed to extremely high levels of nicotine poisoning, according to a new report by Plan.

The report ‘Hard work, little pay and long hours’ reveals that child labourers, some as young as five, are suffering severe physical symptoms from absorbing up to 54 milligrams a day of dissolved nicotine through their skin - the equivalent of 50 average cigarettes.

As the tobacco industry continues to shift its production to developing countries, more vulnerable children are being exposed to these hazardous working conditions. It is estimated that over 78,000 children work on tobacco estates across Malawi – some for up to 12 hours a day, for less than 1p an hour and without protective clothing.

Across Europe and North America

Multinational companies buy the majority of Malawi’s burley tobacco.  This low-grade, high-nicotine tobacco is often used as a filler in cigarettes across Europe and North America.

In Plan’s participatory research, children also revealed the physical, sexual and emotional abuse they suffer and spoke about the need to work under these exploitative conditions to support themselves, their families and pay school fees. They reported symptoms of Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS), or nicotine poisoning, including severe headaches, abdominal pain, muscle weakness, coughing and breathlessness.

“Sometimes it feels like you don’t have enough breath, you don’t have enough oxygen. You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache,” one child said. 

Everyday symptoms of GTS are more severe in children than adults as they have not built up a tolerance to nicotine through smoking and because of their physical size. There is a lack of research into the long term effects of GTS in children, but experts believe that it could seriously impair their development.

“Numerous animal studies have shown that administration of nicotine during infancy and adolescence produces long-lasting changes in brain structure and function, as well as behavioral changes that are not seen when nicotine is administered to adults,” says Neal Benowitz, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biopharmaceutical Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. “The brain of a child or adolescent is particularly vulnerable to long lasting adverse neurobehavioral effects of nicotine exposure.”

Enforce existing laws

Plan is now calling upon all responsible parties to live up to their commitments: the government to rigorously enforce existing child labour and protection laws; plantations to provide safer, fairer working conditions for those children forced to work and multinational tobacco companies to scrutinise their suppliers far more closely and strictly adhere to their own corporate responsibility guidelines.

“This research shows that tobacco estates are exploiting and abusing children who have a right to a safe working environment. Plan is calling for better enforcement of child labour laws and harsher punishment for employers who break them,” says Mcdonald Mumba, Plan Malawi’s Child Rights Advisor.

“These children are risking their health for 11p a day and multinational tobacco companies, who profit vastly from child labour, need to take a more active responsibility for their involvement.”