TOBACCO INDUSTRY HOPING TO ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES

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

DATE: SATURDAY, April 10, 1993                   TAG: 9304100196
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: JOHN F. HARRIS THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: DANVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium
TOBACCO INDUSTRY HOPING TO ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES
The tobacco crop is in the ground across Southside Virginia, and along with the usual worries about bad weather, blue mold and the notorious hornworm, farmers say this spring they fear a whole new menace.
Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The health care commission headed by Clinton, according to senior administration officials, intends to recommend paying for expanded medical care by increasing cigarette taxes under some scenarios by as much as $2 a pack.
The trial balloons floating out of Washington have been treated like incoming missiles 200 miles away in Southside, where the Golden Leaf has been deeply rooted in the economy and culture for generations.
It's a place where people already were acutely sensitive to criticism of tobacco, a product that health specialists call a killer but one by which the region has profited handsomely.
"I've lost 13 pounds in the past 30 days" from worry, said Halifax County tobacco farmer Don Anderson. "I'm most concerned that this is really not a revenue measure. It's a punitive, tobacco abolition measure."
"We are minorities," said Halifax County farmer Fulton Conner, who also is chairman of the county Board of Supervisors. "You can't discriminate against gays, you can't discriminate against women, but all the time they discriminate against tobacco."
The farmers, most of them from families who have been raising tobacco for generations, said increased taxes would reduce demand for cigarettes and cause cigarette makers to buy cheaper tobacco from overseas.
"I think they're in left field and don't understand reality," farmer Jerry Jenkins, of Lunenburg County, said about the Clintons. "If they put that tax on cigarettes, I think they'd find smoking is not nearly as addictive as they thought."
Paul Jeffreys, 67, said he has been a heavy smoker since age 16, except for four months when he quit while being treated for a growth in his throat. As tobacco farmers look to their expected battle against the Clinton administration, they feel "like a high school football team going up against the Washington Redskins," he said.
Of course the tobacco industry has some heavy blockers of its own, and one of the largest is a major presence in the Old Dominion.
Philip Morris Inc. makes more than 140 billion Marlboros and other cigarettes a year in Richmond, where it employs more than 10,000 people. Company spokesman John Boltz said a $2-a-pack tax would cost Virginia 44,000 jobs in the tobacco industry and related businesses.
Much of the tobacco rolled there is grown across Virginia's rural southern tier, where about 9,500 farms raised 51,000 acres of tobacco last year that sold for $196 million, according to state figures.
About 5,000 of those farms are in the 5th Congressional District of Rep. L.F. Payne. In his district, Payne, D-Nelson County, recently wrote the president, "a drastic curtailment of the tobacco industry would mean that many communities would literally die."
In an interview, Payne said he is particularly worried because the other major economic force in his district - the textile industry - faces upheaval because the pending North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade decisions may accelerate the' flight of jobs abroad.
"We do risk a double-whammy," Payne said.
In Danville, for example, two big employers are Southern Processors Inc., which processes tobacco leaves grown on farms in adjacent Pittsylvania County, and Dan River Co., a textile firm that employs more than 5,000 people.
As it is, Southside never would be mistaken as a playground for the rich, but it is far from the poverty of Appalachia. That's because tobacco farmers often make a return that is the envy of other farmers.
Farmers say they can reap as much as $4,500 an acre from tobacco before expenses, compared with about $180 for soybeans, another crop grown in Southside.
Farmer Billy Park dismisses suggestions from anti-smoking advocates that tobacco growers should switch to alternative crops, such as Christmas trees and broccoli.
"There's no other crop in the world, except marijuana," joked Park, who last year made a profit of about $60,000 on his 40 acres of tobacco.
These days many in Southside are imbued with a sharp sense of grievance. Teresa Smith Pool, sales supervisor for a tobacco distributor, drives a maroon Lincoln Town Car with a bumper sticker that says, "Tobacco money paid for this vehicle."
Because their viability has long been tied to the government, tobacco farmers have shown before that they can look out for themselves in Washington. They aim to fight increases in the federal excise tax on cigarettes, which now is at 24 cents a pack.
Al Glass, who represents the tobacco industry for the Virginia Farm Bureau, recently escorted a delegation of tobacco farmers to Capitol Hill.
Glass said his message to the legislators goes back to what U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall said: " `The power to tax is the power to destroy,' and this tax would destroy tobacco."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB