ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609300062
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
ROANOKE hosted a three-day meeting aimed at helping health professionals and growers work together to solve problems.
William Carter Jr., a young tobacco farmer from Waycross, Ga., was worried when he left home for a three-day meeting in Roanoke. The sessions last week would include health professionals and representatives of organizations such as the American Cancer Society and American Heart Association.
"I was just hoping I wouldn't be embarrassed when I got here," Carter said during a break in the meeting at the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center. He expected that the health workers, who consider tobacco Public Enemy No.1, might point fingers at him or call him names.
That never happened. Instead, Carter found that tobacco farmers and the health-care community have some things in common.
"Nobody wants young teenagers to smoke or chew tobacco," Carter said.
Carter, whose wife works at the health department in Waycross, said he would spread the word that the American Cancer Society is not against tobacco farmers. "Tobacco companies have played us against one another," he said.
Health workers only want to educate children about the dangers of tobacco. They don't want to hurt farmers, he said.
The health workers themselves left Roanoke with a better appreciation of the dilemma they themselves face. How do they change public policy and discourage the use of tobacco without harming rural communities and ruining the lives of thousands of small farmers?
"It's important to talk about not only health but the economic health of our farmers," said Dr. David Lewis, an emergency room doctor from Martinsville. Tobacco farmers are among the strongest contributors to his community, Lewis said.
But Lewis made it clear that he also is concerned with the health effects of tobacco. "There's no product in America that causes as much death and suffering as tobacco," he said.
The meeting - billed a "Tobacco and Health Symposium: Both Sides of the Coin" - was sponsored by the University of Virginia's Tobacco Communities Project, Virginia Tech's Rural Economic Analysis Program, the Coalition for Health and Agricultural Development Inc. of Frankfort, Ky. and the American Cancer Society. Participants came from the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.
The unusual multistate effort to get two sides of the prickly tobacco issue together grew out of UVa's Tobacco Communities Project. That two-year exercise in public-policy development involved researchers at UVa and Virginia Tech, farmers and the public.
It developed recommendations aimed at finding ways to help Virginia farmers and rural communities lessen their dependence on tobacco through such things as creation of new off-farm jobs in rural areas and switching to alternative farm products. For those farmers who choose to continue growing tobacco, the study called for development of new farming technologies.
First cultivated in Virginia in 1612 by John Rolfe, tobacco is still the state's top cash crop, although it currently ranks fourth behind beef cattle, milk and poultry as a source of farm income.
Tobacco was grown by roughly 8,400 farmers on over 44,000 acres and generated nearly $175 million in farm cash receipts for Virginia farmers last year. Manufacturing of cigarettes and other tobacco products generates $5 billion annually in Virginia.
The state legislature created a special subcommittee in 1994 to study the problems, including decreased tobacco use and market pressures, facing tobacco farmers. The Tobacco Communities Project made its recommendations to the subcommittee last December.
Earlier this year the General Assembly called for a study of the availability of credit and capital for economic development in rural areas. The legislature also asked the state departments of agriculture and economic development to create a policy for economic development specifically for agriculture.
During the same session, laws on the selling of tobacco to minors were tightened.
The intent of the organizers of last week's meeting is to expand the work of UVa's Tobacco Communities Project to other Southeastern tobacco-growing states. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of Philadelphia, the nation's largest private health-care funder, financed the Virginia effort and has approved a $749,000 grant to expand it to the other states.
Although the grant runs for four years, it shouldn't take that long for people in each of those states to decide what to do to help tobacco farmers cope with the changes they face, said foundation official Kathy Harty. The effort will focus on both health objectives and the needs of farmers, she said.
One thing that participants in the Roanoke meeting agreed was needed is sources of money to help farmers diversify or switch to alternative crops and to help finance rural economic development. One obvious source of funding that they discussed was increasing the states' excise taxes on cigarettes.
The states represented at the meeting have the lowest cigarette taxes in the country. And Virginia's is the lowest of the six at 2.5 cents per pack. Tennessee's tax is 13 cents a pack but all six tobacco states trail far behind Washington state, which levies 81.5 cents tax on a pack of cigarettes and tops the eight states where the tax is over 50 cents a pack.
A one-cent increase in Virginia's cigarette tax at current cigarette consumption rates would bring in an additional $6 million that could be used to help tobacco farmers and communities adjust to the crop's declining importance.
However, Del. Mitchell Van Yahres, D-Charlottesville, chairman of both the House of Delegates Agriculture Committee and the special tobacco subcommittee, said it is politically impossible to increase Virginia's cigarette tax. The cigarette makers with their powerful lobbies won't let a tax increase pass, he said.
Van Yahres said he believes the companies, like Philip Morris, which operates a research facility and manufacturing plants in Richmond, should help tobacco farmers adjust to the new realities. When Philip Morris laid off workers in Richmond, it gave them assistance to deal with the trauma of having lost their jobs, he said.
The companies have been adept at rallying farmers to oppose any attempts to increase taxes on cigarettes, but ironically some farmers are beginning to feel that health advocates are more concerned about them than the companies. One reason for that is the financial and technical help that U.S. tobacco companies are giving to new growers in foreign countries such as Brazil, who are, in turn, competing with U.S. farmers for sales to the manufacturers.
"Companies don't particularly care what happens to the growers," said Rick Apple, a North Carolina tobacco farmer.
Speakers at the meeting predicted the end to the tobacco quota system and price support program either through congressional action or the pressure of the growing international markets. Apple said he doubted the support program would last another six or seven years.
Apple warned the health advocates that if they hoped to work with farmers they need to do it before the support program is killed. Without the support program, the growers will be even more dependent on the tobacco companies for their income, he said.
Few Virginia growers attended the meeting, partly because they are tied up now with the tobacco harvest and partly because organizers targeted it primarily at health-care workers. Among the Virginia growers who did come were Lucy Conner of Halifax County, who said her family grows it because "it just pays the bills," and Claude Whitehead, a Pittsylvania County dentist, who lives on a tobacco farm that's been in his family for 200 years.
He and his children were educated with tobacco money, Whitehead said. But few young people, he said, are raising tobacco now and the farms are consolidating and getting larger. Whitehead said he doesn't think tobacco, which dominates the Pittsylvania farm economy, will be sold to the same extent in the future.
Whitehead, like other tobacco farmers is defensive about health groups attacking tobacco. "I'm sorry people have health problems," he said, adding that other things such as alcohol contribute to those problems. "Just don't put the blame on one product over another," he said.
Lewis, the Martinsville doctor, responded that 50,000 studies and 21 consecutive U.S. surgeon generals have concluded that tobacco is a major American health problem. One day those attending the meeting woke up to find in the morning paper another report by a researcher from the Harvard School for Public Health, who has found that smoking damages lung development in teen-agers.
Despite the differences the meeting did create some agreement. "I think we're doing all right," said Rich Collins, a mediator from UVa who helped referee.
Among the points for future discussion that arose, he said, were:
*Whether tobacco cooperatives could be used to market other commodities as well as tobacco.
*Should rural development be financed with tobacco taxes or general tax revenues?
*How can research on tobacco issues in the various states be better shared?
*Can legislators from the states be brought together to get a better idea of the political realities behind tobacco?
Carter, the 34-year-old Georgia tobacco farmer who came to Roanoke as a guest of the American Cancer Society, said he was going home and continue to raise tobacco like his father and grandfather did before him. "It's a crop I know well," he said.
As for his two sons, "if I have my say they'll be a doctor or lawyer," said Carter, who went from high school straight to the farm. "I want my children to go to school and have a choice," he said.
LENGTH: Long : 167 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart by staff: Tobacco in Virginia. KEYWORDS: MGRby CNB