HEALTH NEWS:THOUSANDS OF child labourers working as pickers on Malawi's tobacco plantations are exposed to nicotine poisoning equal to smoking 50 cigarettes a day, an international children's rights group said yesterday.
Child labourers from three districts in the impoverished African country were examined as part of the study carried out by welfare group Plan, and many described suffering from nicotine poisoning symptoms, including abdominal pains, headaches, coughing and breathlessness.
“Child labourers, some as young as five, are suffering severe physical symptoms from absorbing up to 54 milligrams a day of dissolved nicotine through their skin – the equivalent of 50 average cigarettes,” said the report, Hard Work, Long Hours and Little Pay.
Known as “green gold”, tobacco’s importance to Malawi’s population cannot be understated, as it provides direct incomes for about 300,000 people, many of whom are poor peasant farmers growing small amounts around their homesteads as a cash crop.
The crop amounts to 70 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings and about 40 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product annually.
However, due to the widespread poverty, about 80,000 children are forced to work up to 12 hours a day in the fields picking tobacco for about one cent an hour rather than go to school.
Nicotine poisoning, also known as Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS), is more severe in children than adults as they have not had the time to build up a tolerance level to nicotine through persistent smoking.
It is a common affliction among tobacco pickers, who absorb the drug through their skin from handling the moist tobacco leaves. Its long-term effects on children are not fully established, but it is suspected it impairs physical development.
“Sometimes it feels like you don’t have enough breath, you don’t have enough oxygen,” one child told Plan. “You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache.”
The 44 children who spoke to Plan were aged between five and 14, and many of them described how they had to work under these exploitative conditions to support their own basic needs, like the provision of food and clothing.
Plan has called upon Malawi’s tobacco industry to vastly improve working conditions, and the government to ensure existing child labour laws are enforced in full. “They should provide safe environments and non-exploitative wages and access to education for those children who have to work,” the group said.
Plan also wants the government to rigorously enforce existing child labour and protection laws and “review land inheritance laws which restrict families’ ownership of land”.