A 10-Year Look at the Tobacco Industry Around the World

Nipani, India. Tobacco labourer Dipali Lohar in a mixed field with bidi tobacco and sorgum. This technique helps farmers reduce their dependency on tobacco. © Rocco Rorandelli

Kunming, China. The headquarters of the Kunming Tobacco Cigarette Factory. The factory belongs to Honghe Tobacco Company, part of the Honyun Honghe Group which controls 60% of Yunnan’s cigarette market. With the production of 235 billion cigarettes per year, the group represents the world’s fourth-largest producer. © Rocco Rorandelli

Jakarta, Indonesia. An underage smoker. More than 30% of Indonesian children start smoking before the age of ten, often propelled by lax tobacco control policies, aggressive marketing strategies and low cigarette costs. © Rocco Rorandelli

Milan, Italy. A Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) scanning machine at the European Institute of Oncology, used to detect cancer. This type of expensive equipment is not available to most cancer patients in the world. The global economic cost of smoking is 1,852 billion USD—equivalent in magnitude to 1.8% of the world’s annual gross domestic product. © Rocco Rorandelli

Nipani, India. The Apparamadhange family—owner of five acres of tobacco growing land—drying their yearly production. They have been planting bidi tobacco for the last eighteen years. With no government-run tobacco board, the market is unregulated and there is no organisation providing financial support to farmers. © Rocco Rorandelli

Munich, Germany. Henkel, a chemical and consumer goods company exhibiting at the World Tobacco Expo. Each year, nearly 6 trillion cigarettes are smoked around the globe. Every cigarette is held together by around 0.018 grams of adhesive. Henkel serves tobacco companies by offering a production facility on each continent. © Rocco Rorandelli

Goldsboro, NC, USA. Miguel, a fourteen-year-old Mexican migrant worker, picking leaves in a tobacco field with his aunt and uncle. In the US, teenagers are permitted to work on tobacco farms, and in the summer they can work up to seven days a week, twelve to thirteen hours per day, earning about 8 USD per hour. Handling tobacco leaves causes the trans-dermic absorption of high doses of nicotine, equivalent to smoking up to thirty-six cigarettes. © Rocco Rorandelli

Yuxi, China. Inside the Hongta Group factory. The company claims it has the world’s most advanced cigarette production line, with fully-automated robots. In the Yuxi factory, more than 135 billion sticks are produced per year, covering 12% of China’s total production. China is the largest producer of cigarettes in the world and sells about 2.5 trillion a year. © Rocco Rorandelli

Jakarta, Indonesia. A salesperson promoting Djarum Black Menthol cigarettes during a music parade, organised by Djarum, inside a waterpark. Salespeople are typically female students who must sign an exclusivity contract stating they will not work for any other tobacco company. Tobacco companies in Indonesia have a high-profile presence in music, sport and cultural events, from local to international-level. © Rocco Rorandelli

Periyapatna, India. A farmer’s child sitting on a tobacco bale on the floor of a tobacco auction house. According to the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO), about 1.3 million children work in tobacco fields, with the number increasing in certain countries like India and Zimbabwe. A recent study estimates more than 1.7 million children work in India’s bidi rolling industry. © Rocco Rorandelli

Public health messages about the risks have contributed to the decline of cigarette use in some Western countries, so it can be tempting to overlook the oversized and harmful role the tobacco industry continues to play around the world. Over a period of 10 years, photographer Rocco Rorandelli traveled to nine countries to document the impact of tobacco on health, the economy and the environment. Rorandelli’s project led him to fields, medical centers, vast warehouses, factories, museums and customs facilities.

In Bitter Leaves, to be released by GOST Books in September, Rorandelli’s illuminating photographs are presented alongside texts by scientist Dr. Judith MacKay that interrogate the complexity of the tobacco industry’s reach. Ultimately, MacKay says, tobacco creates “a seemingly endless cycle of poverty, destruction and death.”

As one of the first pages in Bitter Leaves points out, tobacco companies have long disputed that smoking is addictive. “We have not concealed, we do not conceal and we will never conceal…we have no internal research which proves that smoking…is addictive,” said Martin Broughton, the chief executive of British American Tobacco, in 1996.

Rorandelli’s book looks at the aggressive marketing of tobacco around the world. Though the rugged Marlboro Man is an icon of the past, cigarettes are still one of the most marketed consumer products in existence. In Indonesia, for example, where more than 30 percent of children start smoking before the age of 10, tobacco companies have a high-profile presence in music, art, sport and cultural events.

The tobacco industry affects youth in other ways, too. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), about 1.3 million children work in tobacco fields, with the number increasing in countries like India and Zimbabwe. In the U.S. teenagers are allowed to work on tobacco farms, and many of the teen farm workers are undocumented. Because children have lower intoxication thresholds, “handling tobacco leaves causes the trans-dermic absorption of high doses of nicotine, equivalent to smoking up to 36 cigarettes,” says Rorandelli. “The resulting acute nicotine poisoning…is characterized by nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness and probable long-term developmental effects.”

In the decade that Rorandelli spent photographing the many facets of the tobacco industry, he has witnessed the ways it promotes the stripping of farmlands, threatens workers with toxic chemicals, exploits child labor and undocumented workers, and boldly aims campaigns at young people who have the potential to become lifelong consumers.

Bitter Leaves is a sobering and critical reminder that the tobacco industry’s vast reach into our health and homes, is not a thing of the past.

Bitter Leaves
Rocco Rorandelli
GOST Books