Tobacco Farming Negatively Affect The Natural Environment

Cash crops are crops that are grown in abundance for the purpose of making money. One of the commonly cultivated cash crops is tobacco, which is grown in over 125 countries worldwide covering more than four million hectares of agricultural land in the world (Mackay & Eriksen, 2002). Because tobacco is one of the high profit cash crops for multinational tobacco corporations, its production processes have many adverse effects on the natural environment such as increasing deforestation, pollution and soil depletion. This paper will point out how the different stages of tobacco farming negatively affect the natural environment.

Tobacco is a non-essential, non-food crop that causes soil depletion, resulting from the tobacco plant leaching nutrients from the soil, as well as contamination from pesticides and fertilizers. Tobacco agriculture requires high amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from the soil and it offers no replenishment per contra (Akhter et al, 2008). Studies have shown that tobacco growing depletes soil nutrients more rapidly than other major food and cash crops, thus

The population living in areas in proximity to tobacco farms was not given the chance to accept or refuse the establishing these farms that threaten their lives and contaminate their environment, which violates the principle of autonomy. Within the context of Belmont report, given the wide adverse effects of tobacco cultivation on the natural environment, it poses more harm than benefits, which is restricted to tobacco's high profit. This violates the principle of beneficence. In addition, since the shift of tobacco production from high income countries to low and middle income countries (Geist et al, 2009), the latter are experiencing the most harms of this process. Accordingly, such unfair distribution of harm between poor and rich countries of the world hindered Belmont's principle of