Farmers Reap Desolate Harvest on Tobacco Road

These are worrisome and confusing times for Don Anderson. Every day, it seems, he picks up the newspaper to find his livelihood--and, in a way, all that he has worked for and believed in--under attack, as though he were some sort of pariah.

It’s really odd to be told you’ve lived your life wrong, he says, because he has tried to live his right: He’s sweated in the fields while dinner grew cold on the table, taken out loans to buy tractors and irrigation systems, nursed his land until year after year the seeds sprouted and grew taller than a man, each golden-leafed stalk robust enough to supply the tobacco for 13 packs of cigarettes.

His Ford pickup bounced along the dirt road that cut through an expansive tobacco field, and Anderson--college graduate and former salesman who had returned to the land his father and grandfather had tilled before him--pondered a question about the future his passenger had asked. He reached into the pocket of his denim shirt for a cigarette.

“If all the emphasis continues on anti-smoking,” he said at last, “then, yup, I guess our goose is cooked. What you see here”--and he motioned toward the rows of tobacco seedlings covered by plastic--”is the investment of 20 years, my entire working life really, and I’m watching it go down the tubes.”

Tobacco is Virginia’s largest cash crop--and the nation’s sixth largest--and in communities like South Boston, where seven tobacco warehouses loom over the town and a billboard proclaims that everyone is welcome “to exercise their full and free rights to the enjoyment of tobacco products,” tobacco is no more controversial than corn in Iowa or apples in Washington. It’s what makes Christmas possible.

But Anderson and his neighbors know that their little tobacco-growing towns are among the last designated smoking zones left. They have watched anti-smoking restrictions sweep over the nation with such force that one would have thought secondhand smoke was causing people to drop dead at their desks by the hundreds. And they ask: If the government drives us out of business, will the nation’s 50 million smokers really quit or merely buy their tobacco from Brazil and Zimbabwe?

“I spent four years at college to learn how to do this, and now it seems our business is dwindling away,” said Traci Talley, who farms near Anderson. “I always thought we produced so much tax revenue the government would never mess with us. I guess I was wrong.”

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Although tobacco consumption is declining in the United States by about 2% a year, Americans still spend $42 billion a year for cigarettes, which in 1992 produced $11 billion in federal, state and local taxes.

The industry accounts directly for 681,000 jobs, including 136,000 farmers in 23 states. The annual income of tobacco people in Virginia alone is estimated at $800 million. “The tobacco industry,” concludes a study by Price Waterhouse, “is a significant economic force in all 50 states.”

No one in these towns claims smoking is healthy. But then, neither is drinking whiskey, they say.

As for the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that secondhand smoke kills 3,000 nonsmokers a year--a report the tobacco industry is challenging in court as scientifically flawed--the conversation invariably gets around to some farmer who chain-smoked for 80 years and his wife who never touched a cigarette and they both died of old age. Issue settled.

“Smoking’s bad for some people, not for others,” said farmer Kenneth Rickman. “It’s just like drinking. Some people can drink, some can’t. Maybe it’s got to do with genes. But if I want to do something that kills me, why would someone in California possibly object?”

Like Rickman, most farmers say they are convinced that the Clinton Administration wants to quarantine smokers and cripple growers by quadrupling the tax on cigarettes to finance its health care reform plan. The tax, they say, is discriminatory because it targets one group in one region in one industry that already pays more than its fair share.

And if tobacco taxes are to underwrite health care, they ask, who’s going to pay for the program when everyone heeds the government and stops smoking?

“The bottom line is tobacco farmers are in big trouble,” said Larry McPeters, Halifax County agriculture director of the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service. “Are they any different than an IBM executive who gets laid off or a town that loses its military base? You’re darn right they are, because I don’t believe the government has pinpointed IBM or any town and said: ‘We’re going to bust your butt and bury you.’ ”

Anti-smoking sentiment, of course, is not new. Over the years tobacco has even been held responsible for color blindness, baldness, stunted growth, insanity, constipation, impotence and mustaches on women. Russia once whipped smokers, Turkey beheaded them and India slit their noses.

The Massachusetts colony outlawed public smoking in the 1630s, and Connecticut required smokers to have permits in the 1640s. At various times between 1893 and 1921, cigarette sales were banned in North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, Iowa, Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois, Utah, Kansas and Minnesota.

Those prohibitions faded, but Virginia’s tobacco farmers say they fear that this time a permanent change in attitude is taking hold. From the 1964 surgeon general’s report linking smoking to cancer to the most recent surgeon general’s report saying 419,000 people died of smoking-related diseases in 1990, smoking has changed from a commonplace habit to one that is practiced by outcasts huddled outside the doorways of smoke-free buildings.

“I used to be so grateful if I went into a committee room and smokers were kept on one side instead of all over,” said Minnesota state Rep. Phyllis Kahn, chief author of the state’s Indoor Clean Air Act, which, when passed in 1975, was the nation’s toughest anti-smoking legislation. “Now you go into the room and if someone has even smoked in it, you throw a fit. The ante has gone way up.”

Kahn spoke by telephone from a smoke-free room in the Capitol in St. Paul. On the balcony outside, she said with a chuckle, she could see the handful of legislators who still smoke, puffing away and “giving me dirty looks.” Her legislative goal is a total ban on smoking in all workplaces.

Why not just make cigarettes illegal?

“That’s never been my interest,” she said. “Mine has always been the secondhand-smoke issue. But given all we know about the health hazards and all the things that we’ve made illegal, maybe that’s something that should happen at some point.”

With state after state moving to isolate smokers, the tobacco farmers are struggling to organize, adjust and, perhaps, survive.

About 20,000 of them marched on Washington on March 10, a day when the headlines in the local papers said Maryland was about to limit indoor smoking to the privacy of one’s home. On their farms, they have cut back on capital expenditures and started to diversify their crops.

But they are quick to point out that one acre of tobacco--one of the most labor-intensive crops--produces a return of $3,800; that same acre planted in corn grosses about $200.

They have tried sweet potatoes, cantaloupes and broccoli and found that California and other producers were already meeting the country’s demands. They talk about cattle, wonder what value real estate developers would place on their land and fret that the congressional coalition of 30 Democratic lawmakers from tobacco-growing regions may not be powerful enough to turn the tide in Washington.

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Don Anderson turned his pickup back onto the paved road. He passed an abandoned one-room schoolhouse and a cluster of overgrown fields once golden with tobacco. Off to his right, his father, Clarence, 69, and a hired hand were clearing brush.

Washington be damned! There was still a crop to get in and the Andersons would get it in, just as they had for three generations.

“If I went out of business because I couldn’t compete in the marketplace, I’d accept that,” said Anderson, 43. “That isn’t the case, though. America produces the highest quality tobacco in the world. But when you’re out in the fields, working from 6 a.m. till 11 at night, not taking a family vacation for eight or nine years, and you know someone’s trying to legislate you out of business, sometimes you just stop and ask yourself: ‘What am I working this hard for?’ ”