In China, approximately 20 million farmers produce the world's largest share of tobacco. Showing that income from crop substitution can exceed that from tobacco growth is essential to persuading farm families to stop planting tobacco, grown abundantly in Yunnan Province. In the Yuxi Municipality, collaborators from the Yuxi Bureau of Agriculture and the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health initiated a tobacco crop substitution project. At 3 sites, 458 farm families volunteered to participate in a new, for-profit cooperative model. This project successfully identified an approach engaging farmers in cooperatives to substitute food crops for tobacco, thereby increasing farmers’ annual income between 21% and 110% per acre. KEY FINDINGS ?China's Yuxi pilot project on tobacco crop substitution and diversification successfully established that farmers, many of whom are not formally educated, were able to learn the knowledge and skills necessary to operate an enterprise that gave them an income superior to that earned from tobacco farming. ?Farmers at 3 pilot sites engaged in tobacco crop substitution, thereby increasing their annual income by 21% to 110% per acre. ?This pilot project represents a groundbreaking effort supported by local governments and farmers to move tobacco control efforts upstream. IN 2003, THE WORLD HEALTH Organization Framework Convention for Tobacco Control put forth the need to provide “support for economically viable alternative” activities for tobacco workers, growers, and sellers. 1 China was among the 192 World Health Organization member nations that signed the landmark Framework Convention for Tobacco Control treaty, declaring its commitment to tobacco control from an upstream perspective. That was a milestone choice for a country in which approximately 20 million farmers produce the world's largest share of tobacco. 2 In their labor for everyday survival, farmers in China's rural areas face extreme uncertainties on changing their farm livelihood and practice. Here we describe a pilot collaborative effort in Yuxi, China, to enable local farmers to engage in for-profit crop substitution as a means to address the supply side problem. An important historical note precedes this effort. Tobacco production has increasingly been concentrated in developing countries, and between 1971 and 1997, China's share of the world's tobacco production increased from 17% to 47%. 3 Tobacco in China is a state monopoly, which keeps its price artificially low; farmers’ incomes are linked to this dynamic. In this context, enabling farmers to switch to more profitable crops is crucial to decreasing China's tobacco production and to potentially increasing farmers’ standard of living. China, which imports grain, corn, and beans, also may move toward greater self-sufficiency in its food security by converting tobacco farmland to food crops. In addition, reducing tobacco availability can protect the environment through conserving forests by reducing firewood consumption used for flue curing of tobacco. Asia's largest cigarette manufacturer, the Hongta Group, is located in southwest China's Yunnan Province in a tobacco-growing municipality called Yuxi. Tobacco production enables Yuxi's economy to rank first in that province, where more than 600 million mu (1 mu equals about 0.23 Western acre) of farmland produce tobacco. The revenue generated has been significant in improving the livelihood of the population engaged in the industry and in providing tax dollars at the local, provincial, and national levels. The average Chinese farmer owns about 1 mu of land, and a family may own 3 to 7 mu. Showing that income from alternative seed selection and crop substitution can generate equal or greater income is essential to persuading farm families to stop growing tobacco.
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