The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

This presentation will discuss the Rural Integration System (RIS) (or SIR - Sistema de Integração Rural) used by tobacco companies in the southern region of Brazil. It will present the mechanism through which tobacco companies managed to co-opt growers to “represent” the companies, placing them in an “ideology capture” that affects the growers' economic, social and cultural micro universe. It will explain the tobacco productive chain, focusing on the selling of the “Technological Package” and classification control promoted by the industry's RIS at the tobacco leaf selling point. The presentation will also discuss the system that promotes indebting of small tobacco farmers to the producing nuclei of tobacco industries: the true modern servitude. This study also points to existing practices of child labor and pesticide contamination seen in cases of suicides and fetal mal formation. Specifically, it will describe one case, denounced by one small farmer, that indicates public resource diversion from the national Fund for Workers Support (FAT Fundo de Amparo ao Trabalhador) in favor of tobacco industry. The study concludes that tobacco transnational industries' practices in the southern region of Brazil are a question of environmental justice, characterized by unequal risk distribution of economic activities to peripheral countries, thus indicating further political, social and economic limits to the effectiveness of control programs over tobacco chain production.