ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, September 25, 1996 TAG: 9609250086
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
Beverly Sexton, a health educator from rural Kentucky, recalled an incident when a man she was talking with stuck some chewing tobacco in his toddler's mouth to quiet the child.
Sexton works in a tobacco-growing region and grew up in a tobacco-growing family, she said. And she meets with a lot of hostility when she talks about the health dangers of tobacco use.
"My family resents somebody out there trying to take tobacco away from them," she said.
Farmers and anti-smoking activists such as Sexton have gathered at a symposium in Roanoke this week, hoping to grow trust and heal wounds created by the tobacco and health debate.
Participants, who come from six Southeastern states, seemed to agree Tuesday that both the economic health of tobacco communities and the physical health of tobacco users are important. They also agreed that simply telling farmers to grow some other crop will not help them face the upheaval wrought by new public policies regarding tobacco.
Health professionals outnumbered tobacco growers among the 145 people at the meeting, which runs through Thursday. Many farmers who might have participated are now busy trying to save crops damaged by Hurricane Fran.
The meeting's organizers made a special effort to get health professionals to the meeting because of their need to better understand the impact of anti-smoking trends on tobacco growers, said Rebecca Reeve, director of the Virginia Tobacco Communities Project at the University of Virginia.
Among the tobacco growers at the meeting was Lucy Conner of Halifax County, whose husband and sons were back home trying to save this year's crop. Tobacco provides 80 percent of their family's income, Conner said.
Her family, she said, has tried raising livestock and a variety of alternative crops, but tobacco has proved to be the only crop that they know they'll have a buyer for. "To ask us to give that up, it's very hard to do," she said.
Ferrell Guillroy, a professional researcher, added that government assistance to help farmers grow and sell an alternative to tobacco makes sense, particularly if the money comes from a tax on cigarettes.
Wayne Purcell, a Virginia Tech agriculture economist, warned that government can either spend money now to help tobacco farmers cope with the changes facing them or spend money "cleaning up the wreckage later."
In Virginia, he said, the Tobacco Communities Project was successful in getting the state legislature this year to order a study of the availability of credit and capital in rural areas and require state agencies to develop a policy on rural economic development.
Health professionals who spoke, all of whom came from tobacco-producing areas, were sympathetic with the farmers' plight but also said they had seen the health damage that tobacco can do.
Deborah Bryan, who works for the American Lung Association in eastern North Carolina, said her uncle died in his 50s with a tobacco-related disease and she had just watched her father slowly die over the past two years with emphysema and heart disease.
Using Halifax County as an example, Purcell showed that the number of tobacco farms there had dropped from 1,192 in 1982 to 651 in 1992, the years of the last two farm censuses. But tobacco production in the county, as farms got larger, has not dropped in a significant way, he said.
Tobacco produced a profit of $1,426 an acre for Virginia farmers in 1994, Purcell said. The next best alternative researchers found, a double yearly crop of wheat and soybeans, would bring a profit of only $125 an acre, he said.
Sexton, the Kentucky health educator from a tobacco-growing family, may have best summed up the problem facing those who would help tobacco farmers find a new way.
Tobacco farming "is not just a job," she said. "It's not just money; it's your culture. It's part of who you are. You take pride in working with the soil. When I see a tobacco crop, it looks good."
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