Lucia Reyes is five months pregnant and winces with pain every time she bends down to cut the big, floppy tobacco leaves.



The 35-year-old has had six stillbirths over the years, which means it’s down to her daughter Maria, aged 11, to step up and work alongside her father, Camilo Gonzalez.

Side by side they pick, stack, heave and finally thread the sticky green leaves through long sharp needles. Maria has been helping her parents every season for as long as she and her parents can remember.

Now, with Reyes unable to do much, the pressure is really on, as the family is paid per “sarta” – an approximately three-metre length of threaded tobacco. Tonight, there is nothing for dinner and they won’t be paid until the end of the week, when the grower who farms this plantation will pay 16 pesos ($0.85) for each sarta hung to dry between eucalyptus poles. The family managed 20 sartas today, but they’ll need to get faster to make ends meet.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A young girl, age 11, working in the tobacco fields in Santiago.

Camilito, Maria’s wide-eyed, cheery little brother, who is almost four, sometimes helps by carrying tiny piles of leaves – but only when he tires of playing alone. “It’s not much, and not often, but every little bit helps,” says Gonzalez, 36, who started picking tobacco when he was nine years old.

The Guardian visited with the family at the start of harvest season in mid-February, when they were weary after making the gruelling journey to the lowlands of Nayarit, as they do every year, on foot and rickety bus.

They, like most of the tobacco pickers, come from surrounding remote mountain communities, which are home to some of the poorest and most marginalized people in Mexico. They come in search of seasonal work in Nayarit, a tiny fertile state in the north-west of Mexico.

A series of exposés in the 1990s in Mexico revealed widespread use of child labour and banned agrochemicals and detailed abysmal living and work conditions in Nayarit’s tobacco fields.

Q&A How hazardous are tobacco farming conditions? Show Hide Farming tobacco to produce the leaf that fills cigarettes can involve: Gruelling physical labour using heavy hoes, and sharp tools, on rows of plants

Nicotine poisoning or green tobacco sickness through handling the leaves, causing nausea, vomiting, headaches and dizziness

Exposure to toxic pesticides and fertilisers, sometimes without proper protection

Exposure to the sun and high heat for long hours

For some workers and families, a lack of access to good sanitation or places to live and sleep away from the tobacco fields Tobacco firms say they ban under 18s from hazardous work.



With improvements since then, Rodolfo Coronado, president of the industry-aligned tobacco growers’ association, told the Guardian that child labour was “virtually eradicated”.

But during a visit to the Santiago fields in March, the Guardian found that while schemes had improved the situation for some families, there were children working on seven of the 10 plantations visited.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A baby sleeps among tobacco leaves in Santiago.

Families all spoke of the need to thread as many sartas as possible to make enough money to buy food and save a little to buy fabric for clothes and supplement home-grown crops until next season.

Tobacco is one of the toughest harvests, shouldered by only the poorest of the poor migrant families who come generation after generation from as far as Jalisco, Durango and Zacatecas to pick and thread the leaves. The vast majority are indigenous Huichol, Corra, Tepehuan and Mexicanero families.

The jornaleros work, sometimes sleep, eat, and play in the plantations exposed to snakes, insects, toxic pesticides, and the sticky black resin linked to a type of nicotine poisoning called green tobacco sickness.

The firms say safeguards for workers and their families are a priority, and that they have taken significant steps to improve conditions, including protecting against nicotine poisoning.

The big tobacco companies say exploitative child labour is unacceptable and that they were working hard to stop it happening in their supply chains. They say they are encouraging farmers to grow other crops, though added that tobacco gave farms a better income.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A tobacco laborer in Santiago. The poorest of the poor migrant families take on the task. Photograph: César Rodríguez/The Guardian

Production is booming

Nayarit is Mexico’s main tobacco-growing region, producing just over 19 tonnes on 7,300 acres of prime land last year, mostly in the municipality of Santiago de Ixcuintla. In its heyday, during the 1960s, the region harvested five times as much tobacco. After years of decline, production is again booming.

The growers deal with British American Tobacco (BAT) or the Mexican company Tabacos del Pacifico Norte (a subsidiary of Universal Leaf Tobacco) – which sells most of its product to the market leaders, Philip Morris International (PMI) and BAT. The only contact between the jornaleros and tobacco giants are the field engineers who inspect the crops.

The growers are responsible for hiring and paying the seasonal workers, but it’s the tobacco companies that stipulate what services and conditions the jornaleros should receive. This year, the official rate is 17.5 pesos ($0.89) per sarta, compared with 9 pesos in 2010, but the Guardian found payments ranging from 14.5 to 18 pesos, depending on the producer. A family group, depending on size and experience, threads between nine and 100 sartas per day. Dotted around Santiago are small American-style houses built with money made picking tobacco in Kentucky and Virginia, where this year migrant workers, including many growers from Nayarit, will earn about $11 per hour.

Q&A What is green tobacco sickness? Show Hide Green tobacco sickness is a form of nicotine poisoning that workers can be vulnerable to absorbing through their skin, especially if the leaves are wet because of rain, dew or sweat. What are the symptoms? Nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps, headaches, and dizziness while farmers are working or several hours after work ends. Symptoms can last 24 hours; extreme cases may require emergency help. Tobacco firms say they ban under 18s from hazardous work and only allow them to handle dry tobacco when there is no risk to health. How prevalent is it? One US study found about one in four workers harvesting tobacco in North Carolina suffered from green tobacco sickness in a single season.

“A seasonal worker now earns up to 400 pesos (approximately $20) a day, which is not only competitive but above the price paid to workers on other agricultural farms and the minimum daily wage in Mexico,” said a BAT spokesperson.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A family, including a young girl who was playing and helps her mother with string, in the Santiago tobacco fields. Photograph: César Rodríguez/The Guardian

The Prospera scheme

In an effort to eradicate Mexico’s child labour, the Prospera scheme, launched in 1997, offers small cash incentives to impoverished parents to keep children in school and attend health checks and workshops on nutrition, hygiene and family planning. The government paid out $500m to 6.1 million families in 2016, but audits suggest the impact on child labour has been modest.



Several jornaleros told the Guardian that Prospera helped keep some of their children away from tobacco labour, including Gonzalez and Reyes’s five-year-old son. But no matter how hard some families try to get away from these plantations, poverty drags them back.

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Every January until the age of 15, Pamela Cruz spent four months helping her father harvest tobacco. Cruz, now 33, vowed never to come back and registered her children with Prospera. But last year, an economic crisis forced Cruz to return with her malnourished daughters, aged two, five and nine, in tow.

Cruz, sitting cross-legged under a shady palm shelter surrounded by piles of leaves, said: “Of course I don’t want my daughters playing and sleeping next to the tobacco, but I have no one to leave them with in the Sierra and we need money or else we’ll eat only beans, tortillas, eggs and instant noodles every single day.”

A few metres away, the girls dart in and out of the hanging sartas with their 11-year-old cousin, squealing with giggles. The threading is fiddly; children with their small dexterous hands can be good at the work, but it’s dangerous and Cruz thinks Graciela, nine, is still too young to be doing it. “Next year I’ll teach her to thread, but not yet. She could cut herself. As their mother, I have to teach them tobacco because there is no work in the Sierra, nothing. But only after school; my daughters don’t miss school,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The driver of the Florece bus picks up the kids of the tobacco laborers.

The girls attend an industry-sponsored albergue or children’s centre, set up in 2001 in response to criticisms about child labour and run in conjunction with government institutions (health, education and rural development). There are now nine albergues – four Florece centres funded by BAT, which it says benefit almost 1,000 children each season, and five Philip Morris Child Care and Education Centres (known by the Spanish acronym CAEI).

The Guardian visited two centres under supervision. One brightly painted Florece in the La Presa community was built next to a tobacco plantation. Thirty-six excited children aged six to 13 were squeezed into one classroom, with one enthusiastic teacher trying to adapt a lesson on shapes to suit all abilities and ages.

At the CAEI in Puerta de Mango, government money had just paid for new bathrooms, showers and classrooms equipped with oversized televisions.

Both albergues provide two meals a day plus snacks, and showers with treatment for lice and fleas, the Guardian was told. An ad hoc survey of 10 children the Guardian spoke with revealed that like Cruz’s girls, they all help in the fields after school – a few in the morning, too, before the minibus arrives. One burly 11-year-old boy playing football at the CAEI said it was his first day. “I like it, it’s fun here, but my family needs me.”

Jennie Gamlin of University College London, who investigates structural violence and health inequalities, said: “Tobacco workers are the poorest of the poor forced to work and live in poor conditions which expose them to preventable harms that reproduce inequalities. Parents know that it is harmful and wrong according to law for children to work in tobacco, but they’re poor, need the money and don’t see another option. Even when the kids aren’t working, they are playing and sleeping within the tobacco.”

BAT and PMI are tackling some avoidable harms reported by Gamlin. For the first time, portable toilets are installed in the fields this year. Some families have been lent portable iron cooking grills, a few have a wooden table and chairs for meals, and one teenage couple showed the Guardian a protective suit they don’t use because “it makes you hotter than an oven”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A boy and his father threading tobacco leaves in Santiago, Nayarit. Photograph: César Rodríguez/The Guardian

To stop people sleeping under palm shelters skin-to-skin with the tobacco leaves, BAT is providing 350 new lightweight tents it calls temporary accommodation, as part of its support for migrant families. When we visit Gonzalez and Reyes two weeks later, they’re delighted with the tent, as there are lots of spiders and scorpions lurking around. Years ago in the Sierra, their three-year-old son died after being stung by a scorpion. “Things are better now,” said Gonzalez. “There used to be empty chemical containers everywhere in the fields. It smelled so bad. Now it’s much cleaner, and the patron brings us water every day.”

Philip Morris has gone a step further, banning jornaleros from working past sunset and from sleeping in the fields. Its growers must provide accommodation away from the plantations, dropping the jornaleros off early in the morning and collecting them at sunset.



Griselda Romero, 39, a mother of five, has been harvesting tobacco since she was nine, and this is the first year she has not slept in the fields. While glad that her two youngest children attend the albergue, she thinks they should be able to help out after school. The family is averaging 20 sartas a day; last year it was closer to 30. “It’s not enough. It was better when the whole family was here together, we made more money,” Romero said. Last year, her 10-year-old daughter suffered a skin condition doctors said was probably caused by pesticides or resin from carrying leaves. But given the low pay, Romero says she needs the children to chip in.



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“Child labour is unacceptable and we make every effort to stop it happening in our supply chain,” said PMI in a statement and highlighted changes last year it said improved “conditions for 5,000 workers and their families on farms supplying PMI in Nayarit”.

PMI added “there were significant improvements in terms of resting and lunch areas, toilet facilities, and access to drinking and washing water on the vast majority of farms” and to “further mitigate the risk of children being present in the field, we extended the schedule and capacity of five operating daycare and educational centers”.

BAT said it took welfare and safety “very seriously”, and that BAT Mexico supported workers and families and “set rigorous standards relating to working conditions”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The hand of a 13-year-old boy working in the fields in Santiago. He cut his finger with the needle while threading tobacco leaves.

BAT Mexico provides training to avoid nicotine poisoning and distributes personal protective equipment, he said, and invests in social responsibility schemes that directly help families, including Project Florece.



Universal said its subsidiary Tabacos del Pacifico Norte took the issue of child labor “very seriously” and shared its commitments to fight child labour and other labour abuses throughout supply chains.

‘I’ll work in tobacco until I die’

Antonio López, 34, a Huichol, is harvesting tobacco for the 27th consecutive year. Tobacco has kept his family afloat over the years, and conditions have undoubtedly improved some, he says, but it’s still tough. “We still eat with resin-covered hands as it hurts to wash it off straight from the fields, and we can’t afford to wait and waste two hours, so Sunday is the only day we eat clean.”

Like all parents, López wants better for his children, but here they are, playing and working by his side. “Tobacco is the best and the worst, but I don’t know anything else. I’ll work in tobacco until I die.”