Sustainable Intensification: Can Tobacco Farming Be Made Less Harmful—Even as We Try to End It?
The long-term goal is to eliminate tobacco farming. In the short term, millions of farmers depend on it. Sustainable intensification—making tobacco production less environmentally damaging—is a pragmatic interim strategy that the tobacco control community resists.
The FCTC's goal is to eliminate tobacco use—and, implicitly, tobacco farming. But in the interim, millions of farmers continue to grow tobacco, using practices that degrade soil, contaminate water, and drive deforestation. **Sustainable intensification—agroforestry, integrated pest management, efficient curing technologies—could reduce the environmental harm of tobacco farming while transition programs develop. The tobacco control community resists this: improving tobacco farming, they argue, legitimizes it. The farmers who depend on tobacco today cannot wait for the transition that may take decades.**
