WILSON, N.C. - As a lifelong tobacco grower, Doug Webb is grateful the overseas market for cigarettes is booming. As a parent, he doesn't approve of teen-age smoking - anywhere. But he says he can't worry his tobacco may end up in cigarettes smoked by adolescents overseas.
"If they don't get them from us, they'll get them somewhere else," the 43-year-old farmer says. "Everybody has to play their cards for themselves."
As Congress considers the proposed $368.5 billion tax-deductible tobacco settlement - and how such a far-reaching pact might affect the rest of the world - Carolinas farmers like Webb concentrate on surviving.
'Somebody else's problem'
"I don't think they think very much about young kids in Manila smoking," says Ferrel Guillory, a University of North Carolina professor who studies tobacco farm issues for a Chapel Hill research firm. "It's viewed as somebody else's problem."
Guillory says farmers are preoccupied by uncertainties closer to home: the proposed settlement, the industry's shift abroad and how those momentous changes might affect them.
"Their world as they know it is collapsing around them," Guillory says.
And while farmers search for ways to guarantee their long-term survival, anti-smoking politicians and health advocates are vowing any U.S. settlement with the tobacco industry won't be at the expense of the world's young people.
"In agreeing to settle the lawsuits brought against them, the corporate nicotine dealers made sure they retained full authority to provide a nicotine 'fix' that hooks kids around the world to their deadly product," U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, charges.
Phil Carlton, a North Carolina lawyer representing the tobacco companies, says the U.S. tobacco settlement can't set policy - but can be a model - for the rest of the world.
"This Congress and president can't make laws for other countries," he notes, but says the industry is willing to discuss tobacco policy with any foreign government that asks.
Some influential health advocates, including former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, have criticized U.S. trade policies of a decade ago which helped to open new markets for American cigarettes in Japan and other Asian countries.
"The federal government must not serve as an accomplice to big tobacco in the export of death, disease, and disability throughout the world," says Koop.
