Asia Times: Beady-eyed giants take aim at India's beedi industry



	January 14, 2000	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Beady-eyed giants take aim at India's beedi industry
By Ranjit Dev Raj

NEW DELHI - Nothing can be more disingenuous than tobacco transnational corporations (TNCs), indicted for luring young people into nicotine addiction, taking up the cause of child labor in India.

But then, according to activists here, India's beedi (hand-rolled cigarette) industry is a major threat to the interests of tobacco TNCs - to be quickly stubbed out by whatever laws are handy, including those pertaining to child labor and workers' rights.

The humble beedi not only stands in the way of tobacco TNCs waiting to take advantage of liberalization and invest heavily in the vast Indian market, but is burning holes in already-dwindling Western markets, including the United States. Last September, the Wall Street Journal reported: ''Smoking beedis has become a hot fad among young American hipsters. Exports to the US of the cheap, fruit-flavored cigarettes (pronounced beedees) have doubled in the past year.''

Warned Congressman Lloyd Dogrett, ''America will be losing thousands of dollars in taxes.''

Measuring about two inches, each beedi is hand-rolled using the fragrant leaves of the tendu plant, which grows in forests, and filled with specially-grown and cured tobacco. Seventy percent of tobacco smoked in India is in the form of beedis.

The threat was sufficient for the US to impose on November 29 - a day before the WTO meeting in Seattle - a ban on the beedi on the grounds that its production involved child labor and violated worker's rights.

Said Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), here last week for a two-day anti-tobacco campaign: ''We have nothing against beedis as long as they do not contain nicotine.''

Brundtland, who was told by Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that the beedi industry provided employment to rural women and children, said her organization has asked the WTO not to press opening up of tobacco markets in developing countries.

But the real problem, according to Derek Yach, special coordinator for the WHO's anti-tobacco initiative, is that countries like India badly need foreign direct investment and the tobacco TNCs are flush with investible dollars.

During her two-day visit in India, Brundtland had meetings with several key members of Vajpayee's cabinet including Law Minister Ram Jethmalani, who pledged every support for the WHO's proposed Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. But Brundtland failed to meet Yashwant Sinha, India's finance minister, who has offered 100 percent equity participation for tobacco TNCs and presides over a dizzyingly accelerated phase of India's decade-old liberalization.

Recently, Sinha signed an agreement with the US lifting 1,400 specific restrictions on a wide variety of goods in the agriculture, textile and consumer sector, which had enjoyed protection for almost half a century.

Leading Indian activists who attended the Seattle meeting, such as Vandana Shiva and Devender Sharma, said they were astounded by the fact that Sinha never cared to protest against the US ban on beedis despite the dollars they were bringing in. ''The case of the beedi ban proves that when labor standards are invoked for trade sanctions, the real intention is market access and market expansion - in this case on behalf of tobacco monopolies,'' said Sharma.

Shiva said if the United States were serious about protecting children it would not have a Cigarette Advertising and Promotion Code which applied only in that country rather than universally. The hypocrisy was deepened, she said, when the discriminatory codes were applied on the pretext of not wanting to impose US values on other societies.

Shiva said it was worth noting that one of the biggest beedi manufacturers is actually a cooperative, Kerala Dinesh Beedi Worker's Cooperative Society, which represents one of the world's largest and most successful experiments in industrial democracy. ''On the other hand, many of today's major US tobacco giants established themselves on slave labor and have no business preaching labor rights,'' Shiva said.

Far from having anything to do with workers' rights or human rights, sanctions against the beedi threaten the livelihoods of millions of Indians, and the majority of them are women and tribals rather than children.

According to a WHO paper, ''Women, Children and Tobacco'', India's beedi economy provides employment for 40 million men and boys who collect the tendu leaves from the forests. Another 60 million people, mostly women and children, are busy rolling the beedis at home and are subject to merciless exploitation by contractors. Only about 10 percent of beedis are made in regular factories.

Says Margaret Antony, independent researcher on the tobacco industry: ''Many children attend school and assist in beedi-making at other times and 'bonded child labor' is virtually non-existent since beedi rolling is home-based.''

Additionally, the beedi industry also provides employment to farmers who grow the special tobacco and to people who are engaged in its marketing and distribution.

For the government the beedi industry is an important source of revenue which, last year, fetched $165 million in excise and $200 million in foreign exchange.

Said Shiva, ''The government should immediately withdraw concession for foreign direct investment and tax concessions in the cigarette sector and protect the livelihoods of millions of tribals, farmers and women beedi workers.''

(Inter Press Service)

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