Lusaka, Zambia – Representatives of hundreds of thousands of African tobacco farmers will gather at the International Tobacco Growers Association Africa Regional Meeting from May 28 to 30 to discuss outrageous recommendations being developed by international regulators that would destroy their livelihoods.

Farmer leaders attending the meeting from Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe will focus on the recommendations provided by the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) working group on Articles 17 & 18. The FCTC originally recommended that governments of these countries should help tobacco farmers find viable economic alternative crops, assuming that tobacco demand will decline.

Very little research on alternative, economically viable crops has been undertaken and as the group recognises, any future research will require lengthy time trials. However, the FCTC has now put forward unreasonable and absurd measures to phase out tobacco production, without offering the vast African farming community any viable fall-back solutions.

Antonio Abrunhosa, chief executive officer of the International Tobacco Growers Association (ITGA), which represents more than 30 million tobacco farmers and workers around the world, says an entire region’s economy is being put at risk by this “new form of imperialism” by health officials with no experience in agriculture. “With nothing to show for their efforts to find alternatives to tobacco farming, they’re moving toward telling governments to make it impossible for farmers to keep growing tobacco, regardless of the impact on millions of jobs.”

Tobacco farming not only provides a good living for millions of people but it is a vital source of foreign revenue for many of these countries. In Malawi 7 out of 10 workers are either directly or indirectly employed by the sector and tobacco represents 80% of the country’s agriculture GDP.

Francois van der Merwe, chairman of ITGA Africa Region said the decision makers within the FCTC have moved beyond their original intention of helping tobacco farmers find viable alternative crops. “This shift is happening with a complete disregard for the fact that tobacco is one of the only crops that provides sustainable income for many families in this region.”

Jorge Nestor, the Argentinean President of ITGA, referred the vast experience of his association in the search for alternative crops, highlighting the huge investment necessary to develop complementary crops to tobacco, far beyond the possibilities of the majority of tobacco growers’ communities.

The ITGA is a non-profit organization that works to advance the cause of millions of tobacco farmers to the world. It strives to provide a strong collective voice on an international and national scale in order to ensure the long-term security of tobacco farming communities.

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Zambia is a country found in the southern region of Africa and has a population of about 13 million people .The change of government in Zambia last year has changed many things, including the way the news is reported.

At the beginning of the year the media opened up many issues that were not publicly discussed previously and one of these includes the issue of gender violence and child sexual abuse, legally defined in Zambia as Child defilement. These issues are frightening to most parents because they are no longer comfortable to leave their children, especially their girl children, alone with any male relative or stranger, as is the custom with most Zambian families.

More and more cases of child defilement have been reported by the local media, with shocking reports of adult men raping children as young as one month old. Offences of defilement have continued to rank amongst the highest; numbers of those reported are very across the country.

This has prompted the Zambian government and ordinary citizens to demand stiffer punishment for culprits. Current punishments for perpetrators of child defilement includes jail sentences of a minimum of 9 years, but this has not deterred the rising cases of defilement, prompting calls for even more hefty prison sentences, hence the need to increase the sentence to 15 years.

However, for many parents their greatest fear is their children’s risk of contracting HIV should they fall victim of being raped. A common belief among some people suffering from HIV/AIDS is that if they have sex with a minor, then they will be cured of HIV. Most children who are sexually abused, later on test positive to HIV. This phenomenon is a destruction of the future generation, even though every adult has the responsibility to protect it. Nevertheless morals have fallen so much that children are not given a chance.

Stakeholders such as churches, and community workers have been lobbying the Ministry of Education to introduce child defilement education in the school syllabus so that children are aware of the danger of child rape and when children are victims they can seek help from social welfare for those who are not in school and to the teachers and counselors for those who are in schools. This education will help children to know when it is wrong.

The children who have been defiled are abused by close members of the child’s family such as uncles, cousins or grandfathers, and in some cases by their own biological fathers or step fathers. According to Save the Children, Cage the Rapists Posted by AllAfrica on January 11, 2012 we are told that civil society, the Church and all activists should lobby authorities so that appropriate remedies could be considered to deal with what can only be described as an epidemic of dangerous proportions.

Image Courtesy of   Espen Faugstad

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