Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 17, 1990                   TAG: 9007170179
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: ABINGDON                                LENGTH: Medium

DOMESTIC TOBACCO PROMOTED

The drop is more than offset by tobacco export growth, they said. Tobacco imports from other countries, which threatened the domestic tobacco industry in the early 1980s, are now virtually zero.

But if farmers grow less tobacco than the U.S. Department of Agriculture allows, the speakers warned, U.S. cigarette companies might once more have to look to foreign sources.

"We don't want them to start doing that again because, once those contacts are made, they can be very difficult to break," said Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, who set up the seventh annual Ninth District Tobacco Conference at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon.

Burley tobacco is an annual $40 million crop in Southwest Virginia, he said, and could bring in even more if all growers planted and harvested their entire allotments. Boucher said about 80 percent of the allotted tobacco is being grown now. "That means that tobacco farmers are only realizing 80 percent of their potential profit."

"We want the quota grown too," said Charles O. Whitley, a consultant with the Tobacco Institute. "It is not a matter anymore . . . that the cigarette companies have one interest and the tobacco growers have another interest."

Some reasons why full quotas are not grown include bad weather, labor shortages and "the continued nagging perception that tobacco has an uncertain future," said Don Folks, an agricultural extension worker from the University of Tennessee who works with the Burley Stabilization Corp.

"Last year, if growers had produced all the tobacco they could have by quota . . . here in Virginia you could've brought in another $16 million," he said.

Boucher credited the federal Tobacco Act of 1986 with the turnaround in the industry. Among other things, the act set market-oriented price support levels, established a plan for buying up the tobacco reserve that had grown over several years, and required cigarette companies to pay half the tobacco subsidy program previously financed entirely by growers.

That was an incentive for cigarette companies to buy American and keep down the reserves on which they would pay subsidies, he said. Combined with aggressive federal trade efforts to open markets in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea previously closed to U.S. tobacco, he said, the tobacco market "is sound, secure and growing."

U.S. trade efforts are now under way to open Thailand as another tobacco market, he said. It is now illegal for anyone there to possess a U.S. cigarette.

But Richard H. White, vice president for legislative affairs with the Tobacco Institute, said the anti-smoking lobby in this country is trying to convince the General Accounting Office that there is a conflict between government agencies when health officials are warning that tobacco is a hazard and trade officials are peddling it overseas.

He said Thailand - which exports 35 percent of its tobacco - is not worried about its people's health, but about preserving its monopoly. "We're not making them smoke," White said.

Whitley, a former congressman from North Carolina, said the anti-smoking lobby also is trying to tax the industry to death. One proposal calls for doubling the 16-cent excise tax on a pack of cigarettes. Canada has raised its cigarette tax to the point where a pack costs $4.35, he said.

In his 3 1/2 years with the Tobacco Institute, Whitley said he has been called to testify 15 times before various Senate and House committees on the smoking issue - more than any other single person on any issue. That shows the level of opposition to tobacco in Congress, he said.

Whitley said Boucher has helped head off some of the anti-tobacco initiatives that must come before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He said Boucher is the only member of that committee from a tobacco-growing region.

But even Boucher predicted some increase in the excise tax, because of the need to reduce the national deficit. "I would be surprised, quite honestly, if the cigarette industry is able to escape entirely," he said, and would consider the addition of a few cents a victory.

He said the tobacco caucus, composed of about 30 legislators from tobacco-growing states, has gone on record as saying its members would vote against any deficit-reduction measure hitting the tobacco industry too hard.