Sullen Tobacco Farmers: Somebody's Blowing Smoke
By Adam Nossiter
News Yort Times Service

LUCAMA, North CarolinaThe tobacco farmer lunged
forward, his face red with anger at the latest provocation from
Washington.
"Don't get me wrong," said Billy Bass, a gold tobacco leaf
swinging from its chain around his neck. "Tobacco is bad. I wouldn't
tell it any other way. But as long as it's legal, I'll grow it."
The tobacco farmers here have long felt scorned by outsiders.
Each development in the antismoking wars is another blow, and in the
wake of the wideranging settlement announced in Washington last
week, the haze of freshly hurt pride was as palpable in eastern North
Carolina as the new summer's heat.
The deal left tobacco farmers here in Wilson County, the heart
of eastern North Carolina's tobacco country, feeling like agriculture's
pariahs. They do not know if the deal will mean fewer cigarette buyers,
less money for their crop or even eventual ruin for themselves, but
none of a halfdozen farmers interviewed suggested quitting.
"It hurts my feelings, if you want to know the truth," said
Donnie Boyette,
who farms 113 acres (45 hectares) near here.
The farmers' houses are surrounded by the plants, already
robust and dark green. Their ancestors grew tobacco Mr. Bass said his
family had grown tobacco on the same land since 1741. But they are
ambivalent about this lucrative crop.
Most of the farmers volunteered that they did not smoke, did
not want their children to smoke and did not want any teenagers to
smoke.
They also insisted, vehemently, that they are good, hard
working citizens. In America's tobacco wars, they said, they are at least
blameless. In their view, the crop is legal, so if there are ill effects from
it, they are not responsible.
"Tobacco farmers are good people, " said Thad SharpJr., who
lives nearby up Highway 581 in the hamlet of Sims. "They'd give you
the shirt off their back if you had chill bumps."
"We're the people that's the salt of the earth, that's paying the
taxes," said Mr. Sharp, whose 200 acres of tobacco provide 70
percent of his net profit, though he grows soybeans, corn and tomatoes
on 1,800 additional acres.
He was sitting in an airconditioned office, saying he was
grateful that tobacco had brought him all the way there from a
Depressionera boyhood.
"I'm just as good a citizen as I was yesterday," Mr. Sharp said.
"I have no problem with my conscience."
The $360 billion deal notwithstanding, the shortterm outlook
for these farmers is not all gloomy, said an agricultural economist, Blake
Brown.
They are producing more tobacco than 10 years ago, and the
huge export market is helping to make up for drastic declines in
domestic consumption, said Mr. Brown, who works at North Carolina
State University.
About 40 percent of fluecured tobacco, the kind produced
here, is exported. Still, Mr. Brown said, the farrners are earning less
than in the 1970s, as is North Carolina as a whole. Tobacco was 46
percent of the state's farm income in 1964, but only 15 percent 30
years later.
To the tobacco farmers, who often refer to the crop's historic
pedigree, there is something unpatriotic about the tobacco deal.
Why, they ask, should the tobacco companies, and perhaps
they, too, have to pay for something so fundamentally American as the
exercise of free choice the decision to buy a pack of cigarettes?
"I think it's legalized extortion, but that's neither here nor
there," Mr. Boyette said.
"You've got a U.S. company marketing a legal product to a
public that can buy or not buy it. You, as a free American, choose the
pack of cigarettes that was your choice. Now, we've got to pay for
your sickness?"
Mr. Bass said: "If I was growing marijuana out here I could
understand this. Tobacco put this country on its feet used to have a lot
of support. Now everybody's sold it out.'

Congress and tobacco ' company stockholders
were both served. But for members of Congress and President Clinton,
both of whom must now approve the accord, the health of American
youths must be the primary concern.
Under the historic deal, the companies would; agree to major
restrictions that every American can only understand as an admission
that tobacco products are intended to cause addiction and result in
illness and often death. No less historic are proposed tough limits on
the advertising and sales practices through which manufacturers have so
shamelessly targeted youngsters in the search for new smokers to
replace those who died.
Los Angeles Times.