Tobacco Farmers Tell Clinton They’re Fuming

President Clinton traveled to the tobacco belt Thursday to make a case for landmark legislation likely to shrink the region’s lifeblood industry, and he was greeted by an avalanche of anxiety from farmers and employees of tobacco companies.

Tobacco farmer Mattie Mack gave the president an earful, telling him that tobacco had paid a lifetime of bills for her family and that she opposes the legislation.

“We shouldn’t be penalized on account of children smoking,” said Mack, who raised four children and 38 foster children. “It’s parents’ responsibility to teach their children not to smoke, not tobacco farmers’ responsibility not to grow the golden leaf.”

Although she also raises livestock, Mack said: “They don’t bring nothing, and the only thing that we look forward to is tobacco, end of the year, so we can have a little Christmas, have the grandkids come down and play Santa Claus.”

Legislation that passed a key Senate committee last week would impose sweeping new costs and regulations on the tobacco industry, raise the cost of a pack of cigarettes by $1.10 over five years and decrease demand for the tobacco that Mack and tens of thousands of farmers like her grow.

The president and many lawmakers from both parties in Congress support the legislation as a vehicle to counteract the surge in teen smoking.

For farmers and other tobacco workers, Mack declared in her lively, down-home lecture, “tobacco ain’t only bad, it’s good.”

While Mack made her protest inside, hundreds of other farmers and tobacco workers demonstrated outside, carrying signs with such messages as “My tobacco job pays my bills” and “Don’t tax us out of jobs.”

They chanted, “No more taxes,” when the president’s motorcade passed.

Enacting tobacco legislation is Clinton’s domestic priority this year, and many of his other initiatives--from day care to school construction--depend on the $516 billion that would be raised from the new taxes on cigarettes.

The president’s foray into tobacco country came just a day after the nation’s major cigarette manufacturers announced that they were pulling out of tobacco-control efforts by state attorneys general, public health groups, Congress and the administration, and would fight the Senate legislation.

But Clinton stressed that he is determined to push Congress to adopt legislation this year, whether or not the tobacco industry is on board.

While the president has shown little sympathy for the pain the legislation will cause tobacco companies, his trip here brought him face to face with some of the family farmers who grow the profitable crop.

Addressing a community built on tobacco revenues, Clinton said his goal is to cut smoking among children without destroying small farms, but he conceded that will be difficult.

“We don’t have to rob honest people of their way of life,” he said in a speech at the Carroll County High School gymnasium. “But, even in tobacco country, we can’t deny what the scientists have told us or what has been done to market tobacco to children in ways that compromise their future.”

Tobacco is a mainstay crop in Kentucky, where as many as one-fifth of the state’s residents depend at least in part on tobacco for their livelihood, and tobacco is the chief cash crop on 60,000 of the state’s 88,000 farms.

While the Senate legislation provides $28.5 billion over 25 years for buyouts of tobacco farmers willing to leave the business and for the retraining of displaced workers, most tobacco farmers in Kentucky say that they cannot afford to switch to alternative crops if the demand for tobacco drops.

The per-acre yields of other crops are a small fraction of tobacco’s, and most farms in Kentucky are too small to grow other crops at a profit or too hilly to support other crops.

Bill Sprague, a fifth-generation tobacco farmer and president of the Kentucky Farm Bureau, a grass-roots organization that represents farmers, emphasized the farmers’ need for a quick settlement of the tobacco conflict.

“I think the biggest thing our farmers are concerned about is this uncertainty in the whole tobacco industry,” Sprague said, explaining that farmers are not able to make long-term plans.

Sprague and Mack were among a small group of people who discussed their concerns about the tobacco legislation at a tobacco warehouse, where just a day earlier a million pounds had been sold.

“It’s very easy to talk about punishing the tobacco companies for their evil doings,” Sprague said.

But, he added, “we have 60,000 hard-working family farms in this state that depend very heavily on a tobacco crop and these people generate about $1 billion worth of income . . . and that money is all spent in our rural communities.”

For many who have grown tobacco all their lives and whose communities thrive only because of the income their farms create, the prospect of a government buyout does little to ease their worries.

“Our rural communities will be gone, and these are the communities that have been the backbone of America,” said Martha Stephanus, 68, who earns about $16,000 a year from the 10,000 pounds of tobacco she grows on her family farm across the Ohio River in Indiana.

Like many others, Larry Powell, 51, and his father, Earl Powell, 78, believe that the tobacco measures being considered in Washington could mean “life or death” for their family farm in Falmouth, about 70 miles from Carrollton.

“You can tax anything to death. You get the price so high, no one will buy,” said the younger Powell as he chomped on chewing tobacco.

Other crops are out of the question for them and the other farmers in their area because their land is very hilly and inappropriate for row crops, they said.

The Senate legislation “would pretty well bankrupt the county,” added the elder Powell, a lighted cigarette in his hand.

Terry Juglowicz, 48, who leases his farm to a neighbor who grows tobacco and works in the finance department of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., the nation’s third-largest tobacco company, said that he believes the government’s real objective is more sinister than reducing teenage smoking.

“They have a hidden agenda to legislate tobacco out of existence by adding enough taxes to price it such that a person will stop smoking. And that really bothers me.”

Juglowicz was one of a few hundred people Brown & Williamson bused in from Louisville to register their protest.

While Clinton was unable to satisfy concerns about the effect of higher tobacco taxes, he expressed his continued support for the government’s $43-million tobacco price-support system.

“I heard today that the people here in this county do not want any more uncertainty. They want us to act,” Clinton said.

“It would be better if we could act with the tobacco companies at the table too. . . . But we’re going to do this this year.”

Meanwhile, Nicholas G. Brooks, chairman and chief executive officer of Brown & Williamson, stood in the chilly drizzle with hundreds of his employees.

Brooks said he was “offended” by the charge Wednesday from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that the tobacco companies’ decision to fight the Senate bill is a form of blackmail.

“He’s asking us to sign a suicide note,” Brooks said. “We’re not trying to blackmail anyone.”