{"id":66119,"date":"2015-11-09T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=66119"},"modified":"2015-11-09T09:06:23","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T09:06:23","slug":"tobaccos-children-brazil-sets-an-example-for-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/tobaccos-children-brazil-sets-an-example-for-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Tobacco\u2019s Children: Brazil Sets an Example for the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

3 Nov 2015 – <\/em>On a warm January afternoon in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Sandra, a forty-year-old tobacco farmer, dragged a lawn chair to a clearing in her front yard and motioned for me to sit. She was round-faced, with wispy blonde hair pulled into a messy ponytail, her skin creased from years of working in the sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been growing tobacco since we were twelve or thirteen,\u201d she said, as her husband sat beside her. \u201cOur parents planted tobacco.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A 17-year-old worker stands in a field of harvested tobacco plants in Kentucky.
\u00a9 2013 Marcus Bleasdale\/VII for Human Rights Watch<\/p><\/div>\n

I was two days into a month-long trip to investigate child labor in tobacco farming in Brazil, which in 2008 banned all work on the crop by children under eighteen. I had spent two years researching the issue in the United States, where children can legally be hired to work on tobacco farms at age twelve.<\/p>\n

Both\u00a0countries are among the top five global tobacco producers\u2014Brazil is number two and the United States is number four. But the United States has no restrictions on children working in tobacco farming, despite known dangers including nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure, heat illness, and injuries. I was curious to see how Brazil\u2019s ban was working.<\/p>\n

Sandra\u2014whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, as with others quoted in this article\u2014plants a few hectares of tobacco each year and sells it to a multinational company that supplies tobacco leaf to the world\u2019s largest cigarette manufacturers. She and her husband do most of the work on the farm themselves. They have two children: a daughter in her midtwenties who moved away from home to go to college in a nearby city, and a fourteen-year-old son, Matteo, a tall boy with a square jaw and braces.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur daughter, when she lived here, she helped,\u201d Sandra told me. \u201cShe did everything, from the harvest to planting. She started helping when she was about fourteen.\u201d But Matteo claimed he does not do much work on the farm. \u201cI help a little bit, but mostly I stay on the Internet,\u201d he said, smiling.<\/p>\n

I was skeptical. I understood that farmers would be reluctant to talk about child labor with a foreigner who had arrived at their door unannounced, speaking through an interpreter. After what I\u2019d seen in my research in the United States, I had a hard time believing that the strong, athletic boy slumped in a chair across from me sat at home on the computer while his parents worked long hours in the fields.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A 15-year-old worker removes flowers from the tops of tobacco plants on a farm in North Carolina. Many children work in fields of tall tobacco plants, pulling the flowers off the tops of plants, among other tasks. Most work without gloves or other protective gear, exposing them to nicotine and pesticides.
\u00a9 2013 Human Rights Watch<\/p><\/div>\n

But the family insisted it was mindful of the new law. Sandra warned of penalties if their son was caught working, though she wasn\u2019t sure what the penalties would be. \u201cThey can take you to court,\u201d she said. \u201cThe company says there\u2019s no way children can work in tobacco farming.\u201d Sandra and her husband hire a few adult workers to help on the farm during the harvest.<\/p>\n

I learned that Matteo, who attends the local high school and hopes to study microelectronics, does help on the farm in the summer, but not nearly as much as his older sister did. He takes water to his parents in the fields. He loads piles of brittle, dried tobacco leaves into a wooden crate to form bales that weigh more than 130 pounds. Every so often, he helps his parents harvest tobacco, picking the thick green leaves by hand and holding them under his arm. \u201cI don\u2019t allow him to work when the leaves are wet,\u201d Sandra told me. \u201cIt can make him sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

A\u00a0year and a half earlier, I had interviewed a fourteen-year-old girl on a humid July morning as she prepared for a day of work on a tobacco farm in eastern North Carolina. It was her first week on the job, and she had gotten sick.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy head started hurting, and I kind of felt like throwing up,\u201d she told me. The tobacco plants were dripping wet from dew and rain, and her clothes got soaked while she worked in fields. \u201cI just go home in my wet clothes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her symptoms are consistent with nicotine poisoning, an occupational health risk specific to tobacco farming. When tobacco is wet, and especially when the weather is warm and humid, nicotine dissolves in the moisture on the leaf\u2019s surface and can be absorbed through the skin. Common symptoms include nausea, vomiting, headaches, and dizziness, and children are affected more severely than adults.<\/p>\n

In our research in the United States, my colleague and I interviewed more than 140 child workers, most of whom had started working at age twelve or thirteen. Two-thirds reported symptoms of nicotine poisoning. Most had never been told anything about the illness by their employers, though some knew their symptoms were linked to working in wet conditions.<\/p>\n

But Sandra knew about nicotine poisoning, or \u201cgreen leaf sickness,\u201d as it\u2019s called in Brazil. A tobacco company instructor came to the farm to give the family health and safety information about nicotine and pesticide exposure, as well as Brazil\u2019s child labor restrictions. He warned them not to harvest when the tobacco was wet, and to wear the protective gear provided by the company at a cost to the family. The gear she described\u2014water-resistant pants and a long-sleeved jacket with air vents in the back\u2014was hot and uncomfortable, but it helped her stay dry when the fields were wet.<\/p>\n

The child tobacco workers I interviewed in the United States received no protective equipment. Most brought plastic garbage bags from home, poked holes for their heads and arms, and pulled them on to try\u2014often unsuccessfully\u2014to keep their clothes dry.<\/p>\n

Sandra and her husband also received a separate set of equipment for applying pesticides, including a mask. Tobacco production in Brazil\u2014as in the United States\u2014involves applying a range of toxic chemicals at various stages in the season. Sandra\u2019s husband had taken a pesticide safety course offered by the company two years earlier. \u201cIt helped me realize I was doing it wrong,\u201d he said. When I asked if anyone in the family had gotten sick after working with the pesticides, they shook their heads.<\/p>\n

The children I had interviewed in the United States had not been given any pesticide safety training, and more than half reported seeing tractors spraying pesticides in fields near where they were working. They said they could taste and feel the spray drift over them. They said it made their eyes and skin burn, and caused them to vomit, feel dizzy, and have trouble breathing.<\/p>\n

Children are especially vulnerable to harm from pesticides because their bodies and brains are still developing. The long-term effects of childhood pesticide exposure can include cancer, problems with learning and cognition, and reproductive health issues.<\/p>\n

Over the next three weeks, I interviewed almost eighty farming families in Brazil\u2019s three largest tobacco-growing states: Paran\u00e1, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul.<\/p>\n

Like Sandra and her husband, they were small-scale growers, selling to one\u2014or sometimes several\u2014Brazilian or multinational tobacco companies. They greeted me with the same warm hospitality, spreading lawn chairs in their front yards and passing around a traditional communal cup of steaming chimarr\u00e3o, a kind of tea. Even though the farmers sold to a dozen different tobacco companies, their experiences were remarkably similar.<\/p>\n

All of them knew that children under eighteen are prohibited from work in tobacco farming. Most families said their farms had not been inspected by government officials and could not describe the specific consequences of a child labor violation, but they feared the penalties just the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf someone from the company came out, and we had our fourteen-year-old son out in tobacco, it would be very difficult for us,\u201d a lean fifty-year-old farmer I met in Rio Grande do Sul told me.<\/p>\n

Ministry of Labor and Employment officials I interviewed told me their offices are understaffed; they don\u2019t have enough inspectors to enforce labor laws consistently and effectively. But the families I interviewed saw the threat of punishment as real, and it prompted them to change how their children worked on farms.<\/p>\n

Some parents also understood that tobacco farming had health consequences, and didn\u2019t want their children exposed to the work. Beatriz, a fifty-two-year-old farmer in Paran\u00e1, had an uneven gait, and suffered from chronic leg and back pain and kidney problems, which she attributed to years of work in the fields. She said she hallucinates and gets dizzy when harvesting tobacco.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey say it\u2019s because of the nicotine that goes through the skin,\u201d Beatriz told me. Although she was among the poorest farmers I met, she chose to hire workers rather than send her seventeen-year-old daughter to the fields. \u201cI don\u2019t let her do it,\u201d she said. \u201cI grew up working in tobacco, and now I have health problems.\u201d Many other families told me they hired workers during the harvest, or swapped work days with neighbors and family members on other farms, rather than risk using their children.<\/p>\n

Several farmers showed me the contracts they signed with tobacco companies, which included\u00a0clauses about the child labor ban. Some families said company instructors checked with teachers and principals to verify children\u2019s school attendance.<\/p>\n

They wore the same water-resistant suits and pesticide safety gear that Sandra\u2019s family had, and had the same colorful booklets with smiling tobacco farmers happily harvesting green leaves and spraying pesticides while wearing company-furnished protective equipment. The uniformity was striking, across all three states, from families living near urban areas to those in remote towns.<\/p>\n

In the United States, I had interviewed dozens of children working fifty or sixty hours a week as hired laborers on tobacco farms. I saw them get drenched while working in wet tobacco fields with nothing but plastic trash bags to protect them from the nicotine and pesticide residues seeping into their skin. They described searing headaches, sudden vomiting, and dizziness that lasted all through the night.<\/p>\n

The contrast between Brazil and the United States was stark and overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Child labor has not been completely eliminated on Brazil\u2019s tobacco farms. Children still work in the tobacco fields, driven there by economic duress, as in the United States.<\/p>\n

Rural poverty remains a problem in many parts of Brazil, and many farmworker advocates are concerned about what they see as unfair practices by large tobacco companies. Farm families are not guaranteed minimum earnings. The companies determine both the price of the agricultural inputs\u2014seeds, pesticides, and other supplies, which farmers are required to buy from the companies\u2014as well as the price and classification of the tobacco leaf once it\u2019s harvested. Small farmers have little control or room to negotiate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a yearly battle,\u201d a thirty-two-year-old farmer in Santa Catarina told me. Many farmers carried debts with the companies through the season and paid them off after the harvest. Sometimes, even then, they came up short.<\/p>\n

But progress is being made on helping families understand the health hazards of the work, especially for children. This did not happen overnight. Some parents grumbled about how children would never learn to work if they were kept out of the fields until they were eighteen.<\/p>\n

Amelia, a sixty-three-year-old grandmother in Paran\u00e1, framed it as a question: \u201cYou know what happens to children who don\u2019t work? They become drunks.\u201d A man in his midsixties in Santa Catarina gestured to his thirty-eight-year-old daughter and her thirty-five-year-old husband, who both worked as children, and said, \u201cSee? They didn\u2019t die. They\u2019re still here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, the strict regulation and penalties pushed people to end or limit their children\u2019s work on the farm. No such constraints are keeping kids out of the tobacco fields in the United States. Here, the child labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act\u2014the federal law governing the employment of children\u2014treat agricultural work differently from work in all other sectors.<\/p>\n

Children of any age can work on small farms with parental permission. Children can be hired at age twelve to work on a farm of any size, for unlimited hours outside of school\u2014day or night\u2014provided they have written parental consent or work on a farm where a parent is employed.<\/p>\n

In all other employment sectors, sixteen is the minimum age for most jobs, and younger children can work only in certain jobs for limited hours. At sixteen, children working in agriculture can do jobs deemed \u201cparticularly hazardous\u201d by the U.S. Secretary of Labor, while children in all other sectors have to be eighteen to do hazardous work.<\/p>\n

For years my colleagues at\u00a0Human Rights Watch<\/a>\u00a0and other children\u2019s advocates pushed for a bill in Congress to provide child farmworkers with the same protections as workers in other sectors, but the bill was never brought to a vote.<\/p>\n

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor introduced regulations that would have updated the decades-old list of hazardous occupations prohibited for children under sixteen working in agriculture, and banned all work by these children in tobacco farming. The proposal was withdrawn after it drew opposition from agricultural interest groups.<\/p>\n

Prohibiting children under eighteen from working with a crop as toxic as tobacco may not sound like a radical notion. In most of the country, a person must be eighteen to buy a pack of cigarettes legally; California and New York City have raised this to twenty-one.<\/p>\n

Yet on the day in May 2014 that we published our report, a tobacco company spokesman was\u00a0quoted<\/a>\u00a0by the Associated Press as saying that banning children from tobacco work \u201cis really contrary to a lot of the current practices that are in place in the U.S. and is at odds in these communities where family farming is really a way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since we published our\u00a0report<\/a>, some tobacco companies and tobacco growers\u2019 associations have adopted new child labor policies, or strengthened their existing policies. Now, most major players in the U.S. tobacco industry agree that children under sixteen should not be hired to work in tobacco farming. It\u2019s an important step, but it still means sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are in U.S. tobacco fields doing work that could make them sick.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government has been reluctant to revisit the regulations issue. In April, bills were introduced in both the Senate and the House to ban children under eighteen from hazardous work on U.S. tobacco farms, but prospects are dim for legislative change in the current Congress.<\/p>\n

With only incremental changes made toward eliminating child labor in tobacco farming in the United States, it is heartening to know that Brazilian tobacco farmers who were raised working in the fields are now thinking differently about child labor. The United States should take note of the example being set by its neighbor to the south.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

MargaretWurth<\/em> – Researcher, Children’s Rights Division<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 hrw.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brazil and the United States are among the top five global tobacco producers. The US has no restrictions on children working in tobacco farming, despite many known dangers. But Brazil has banned children under 18 from working on the farms. How do the two countries compare now?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}