Last year an acre of sweet corn earned about $586, according to government statistics; an acre of tobacco earned $3,478. In North Carolina, which produces two thirds of the country’s flue-cured tobacco, the leafy crop pulled in $906 million last year–almost eight times the amount earned by every vegetable grown in the state. Across the country, Americans spent some $37.8 billion for tobacco products in 1988, up $2.3 billion from the previous year. Farmers are not the only ones addicted to tobacco money. Federal, state and local governments collected about $11 billion in taxes from tobacco sales in fiscal ‘88. And while fewer Americans are smoking, a growing international market is taking up the slack. Tobacco products had a trade surplus of $4.2 billion last year, the largest amount in the more than 400-year history of tobacco trade.
But the growing antismoking movement is starting to pinch America’s estimated 180,000 tobacco growers. A more health-conscious America and political trends are weighing against tobacco. In North Carolina, the crop now accounts for only about 20 percent of the state’s annual farming income, down from about 50 percent in the ’60s. “We’re addressing the health issues,” says Len Stanley of Commit to a Healthier Raleigh, a stop-smoking group that operates in the heart of tobacco country. “We’re not against the farmers.”
Antismoking activists have yet to offer a satisfactory plan for weaning farmers from tobacco. They “dismiss the farmers as irrelevant,” says Walker Merryman, vice president of the Tobacco Institute, who calls a smoke-free America a “pipe dream.” The activists say that farmers should diversify by planting other crops or cultivating catfish. Those plans have been around for years and have never caught on. “When they say diversification, what they are really talking about is replacement,” says Charles Harvey, president of the Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina. “There is no other crop that can replace tobacco. Period.” No legal crop, that is. Law-enforcement officials estimate that $1.5 billion worth of marijuana was grown last year in North Carolina.
Most tobacco producers feel part of a proud tradition and have nothing to do with illegal drugs. They take the antismoking attacks personally and they particularly resent comparisons to Third World drug growers. But no matter how taboo smoking becomes, one equation ensures that tobacco farming will continue. Plant tobacco–pay your bills. “People have been saying, ‘Don’t smoke’ for years,” says Guthrie’s farming partner, Clayton Garner. “But we’re still growing tobacco and that’s the way it’s going to be for a long time.”
