Agriculture and Environment: Tobacco

Environmental Impacts of Production: Deforestation

A tremendous amount of wood is used to dry or cure tobacco.

In southern Africa alone an estimated 200,000 hectares of woodlands are cut annually to support tobacco farming. This accounts for 12% of deforestation in the region.

Wood, preferred fuel for drying tobacco
Most of the wood is used as fuel (69%), but wood is also used as poles for building curing barns and racks (15%) for hanging the leaves while they dry. The two most common methods of processing - fire curing and flue curing - both require fire or heat, though substitute fuels such as charcoal, coal, or oil can be used.

Also contributes to global warming
One researcher estimates that 19.9 cubic meters of wood are used to cure every metric ton of tobacco in those areas where the energy comes from wood (Geist 1998). In addition, burning fuel to cure tobacco releases CO2, which contributes to global warming.

Unregulated deforestation
In the United States, China, and Europe petroleum, coal, and natural gas are now common alternatives to wood. However, in most developing countries where increasing amounts of tobacco are harvested, producers still rely on the use of readily available and unregulated wood supplies from forests.

Brazil, India, the Philippines, and most of Africa use wood for curing tobacco. A wood shortage is looming in Malawi and western Tanzania as a result of deforestation in the main tobacco growing regions. Tobacco alone is estimated to account for 5% of Africa's total deforestation, and 20% of deforestation in Malawi (Geist 1999). The amount of deforestation attributed to the production and curing of tobacco is shown for several countries in Table 1.0.

Table 1.0 Percentage of Total Annual Deforestation Related to the Production and Curing of Tobacco in Selected Countries, 1990-1995

Country	Deforestation (%)
South Korea	45.0
Uruguay	40.6
Bangladesh	30.6
Malawi	26.1
Jordan	25.2
Pakistan	19.0
Syria	18.2
China	17.8
Zimbabwe	15.9

Source: Geist 1999.

Extensive use of paper
Additional pressure on forests comes from the use of paper associated with wrapping, packaging, and advertising cigarettes. Modern cigarette-manufacturing machines, for example, use more than 6 kilometres of cigarette-width paper per hour to manufacture cigarettes (Tobacco Free Kids 2001).

The packaging of cigarettes and other tobacco products may require two to three times as much paper by weight as tobacco. It requires roughly 4 to 5 metric tons of wood from a forest to make 1 metric ton of paper, so every metric ton of tobacco product sold would require some 8 to 15 metric tons of wood for packaging material.

Yet, according to the industry, wrapping and packaging account for only 16% of its overall use of forest products (Tobacco Free Kids 2002). If this estimate is correct, the industry uses 50 to 94 metric tons of wood per metric ton of tobacco, for a total of 340 million to 639 million metric tons of wood per year.

Advertising, probably the largest single paper use of the industry
Given the millions of copies of newspapers, periodicals, etc. sold every week throughout the world, it is quite likely that advertising is the largest single paper use of the tobacco industry. Cigarettes that have not been extinguished properly also contribute to deforestation, posing a serious fire hazard. It is estimated that one-quarter to one-third of forest fires around the world are caused by careless smokers.

If that estimate is accurate, then the amount of wood in forests that is burned by smokers could surpass the sums used by the entire tobacco industry. Apart from the human and property costs, such fires have huge impacts on forests, biodiversity, and watersheds. When all these different impacts are totalled, it is clear that the tobacco industry is a major contributor to deforestation, which has serious ecological consequences including the loss of ecosystem functions and biodiversity as well as soil erosion and degradation.