The global tobacco industry, valued at $850billion (2021) with the 6 largest companies earning $55billion in profit (2015), is profiting off the backs of an estimated 1.3 million children involved in tobacco production worldwide. Tobacco leaf is grown in more than 120 countries, but the incidence of child labor is under reported. In 2020, the US Department of Labor listed 19 countries which use child and forced labour in tobacco production is present.

For many farming households in low-income countries, growing tobacco offers only a precarious livelihood, overshadowed by debt and the threat of poverty, in stark contrast to the profits of the big tobacco companies. Many smallholder farmers – who produce much of the world’s tobacco leaf – feel they have little choice but to enlist their children to work.

According to the global tobacco industry watch, STOP, tobacco companies have the power and resources to determine the level of wages and price of agricultural inputs, and can control the salaries that suppliers or contractors pay. However, their practices worsen children’s plight. They use layers of contracts to avoid direct responsibility for growers and workers, keep leaf prices low, and provide loans that keep farmers dependent. To obscure the real problem, they use agricultural front groups, and partnerships with renowned organizations to undertake token community activities. All these effectively suppress progress towards diversification of strategies that would remove children from tobacco farming.

Child labor in tobacco falls under “worst forms of child labor” due to the hazardous nature of handling tobacco. This mainly occurs in the tobacco fields and bidi factories, but can also occur throughout the whole tobacco cycle, for example, children selling cigarettes.

Children working with tobacco are placed at high risk of injury and illness, for example ‘Green Tobacco Sickness’ caused by nicotine poisoning through the skin. The absorption of nicotine causes symptoms which include nausea, weakness, dizziness, headaches and breathing difficulties. They are also exposed to large and frequent applications of pesticides, herbicides and fumigants that leads to a range of risks.

Child tobacco workers often labor 50 or 60 hours a week in extreme heat, use sharp and dangerous tools, lift heavy loads, and climb into the rafters of barns, risking serious injuries and falls.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 28% of children working in agriculture in general do not attend school at all, a blow to their best chance of avoiding the generational poverty trap.

Meanwhile, tobacco industry corporate social responsibility (CSR) obscures the plight of children in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). Tobacco industry-backed publicity includes information of how 204,000 children were removed or kept away from child labor detracting from the legal and human rights of children exploited or the just compensation required to undo decades of harm. Some governments have yet to resist so-called CSR of tobacco companies and realize that the tobacco industry is the problem and not partners in the elimination of child labor. 

The Eliminating Child Labour in Tobacco Growing (ECLT) Foundation, sponsored by big tobacco companies influence the anti-child labor narrative across the world. Through the ECLT, tobacco companies partnered with and funded the ILO and governments to position themselves as safeguarding the rights of child worker and “being part of the solution”.

While ECLT achieved little in reducing child labor, it added to the glossy sustainability reports of tobacco companies designed to attract more investors.

After coming to the conclusion that tobacco industry sponsorship has not led to much progress in eliminating child labor, in 2018 ILO announced it will not renew ECLT and tobacco industry funding. However, links between the ILO and the ECLT remains.

Child Labour: No Quick End to Children Trapped in Tobacco Production | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Pollution is killing 9 million people a year, a review has found, making it responsible for one in six of all deaths. Air pollution caused almost 75% of the 9 million pollution deaths. Toxic chemicals resulted in 1.8 million deaths, including 900,000 deaths from lead pollution, which is more than from HIV/Aids. Lead poisoning could significantly reduce intelligence across large populations.

The number of deaths from chemical pollutants was likely to be an underestimate, the scientists said, as only a small proportion of the 350,000 synthetic chemicals in use had been adequately tested for safety. The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet has passed the safe limit for the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, researchers reported in January.

Unsafe water causes 1.4 million early deaths a year. More than 2 billion people still do not have access to clean drinking water.

Toxic air and contaminated water and soil “is an existential threat to human health and planetary health, and jeopardises the sustainability of modern societies”, the review concluded.

The researchers said pollution, the climate crisis and the destruction of wildlife and nature “are the key global environmental issues of our time. These issues are intricately linked and solutions to each will benefit the others. But we cannot continue to ignore pollution. We are going backwards.”

The death toll from pollution dwarfs that from road traffic deaths, HIV/Aids, malaria and TB combined, or from drug and alcohol misuse. The researchers calculated the economic impact of pollution deaths at $4.6tn (£3.7tn), about $9m a minute.

Prevention was largely overlooked in the international development agenda, the researchers said, with funding increasing only minimally since 2015.

Deaths from toxic air and chemicals have risen by 66% since 2000, driven by increased fossil fuel burning, rising population numbers and unplanned urbanisation. This rise was offset by improvements in the “ancient scourges” of water polluted by pathogens and poor sanitation and indoor smoke from cooking fires.

Prof Philip Landrigan, at Boston College in the US and a lead author of the analysis, said: “Pollution is still the largest existential threat to human and planetary health. Preventing pollution can also slow climate change – achieving a double benefit for planetary health – and our report calls for a massive, rapid transition away from all fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.”

More than 90% of pollution deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, such as India and Nigeria. While high-income countries, such as the US and members of the EU, had controlled the worst forms of pollution, the researchers said, few less affluent nations had been able to make pollution a priority.

“Pollution has typically been viewed as a local issue,” said Rachael Kupka, at Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP), which includes the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank. “However, it is clear that pollution is a planetary threat. Global action on all major modern pollutants is needed.”

Pollution also crossed international borders, carried on winds or in food exports, said Richard Fuller, at GAHP in Switzerland, another lead author. “If we’re going to keep everyone safe, we need to help countries that have these toxic problems to stop the pollution at the source.”

 Hard-up families are skipping meals, wearing coats indoors to stay warm, and living in the dark because they can’t afford to switch on the lights, according to the leading children’s charity, Action for Children.

Current levels of severe and persistent hardship among families supported by the charity’s children’s centres, triggered by cuts to universal credit and rising energy bills, were among the worst it could remember, said Action for Children’s director of policy, Imran Hussain.

“The worst pain and misery of the cost of living crisis is being felt by children in low-income families, yet the government is refusing to target help for these children or accept that it needs to rethink its huge cut to universal credit,” he said.

A children’s hardship fund set up by the charity two years ago to provide one-off help to struggling families during the pandemic has evolved into a “permanent crisis fund” helping thousands of families. Analysis of the crisis fund showed that half of families accessing it for help reported stress, anxiety or mental health concerns among the adults or children. One in five applications highlighted the £20 cut in universal credit last October as a trigger for the families’ difficulties.

Poor families skipping meals and unable to afford heating, charity says | Poverty | The Guardian

Nearly half of existing fossil fuel production sites need to be shut down early if global heating is to be limited to 1.5C, the internationally agreed goal for avoiding climate catastrophe, according to a new scientific study. The new research reaches its stark conclusion by not assuming that new technologies will be able to suck huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere to compensate for the burning of coal, oil and gas. Experts said relying on such technologies was a risky gamble. The researchers said governments should accelerate the introduction of renewable energy and efficiency measures instead.

The new study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, analysed a database of more than 25,000 oil and gas fields and developed a new dataset of coal mines. The researchers found that fields and mines that have already been developed would lead to 936bn tonnes of CO2 when fully exploited and burned. That is 25 years of global emissions at today’s rate – the world’s scientists agree emissions must fall by half by 2030. The researchers calculated that 40% of developed fossil fuels must stay in the ground to have a 50-50 chance of global temperature rise stopping at 1.5C. Half the emissions would come from coal, a third from oil and a fifth from gas. The researchers found that almost 90% of developed reserves are located in just 20 countries, led by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the US, followed by Iran, India, Indonesia, Australia and Canada.  The research only considered projects where companies had made final investment decisions, that means committed to spending billions on building rigs and pipelines to extract the fossil fuels. A 2021 study, led by Daniel Welsby at University College London, assessed all known reserves and found 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas must remain unexploited.

Greg Muttitt, at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, was one of the leaders of the new research and said: “Halting new extraction projects is a necessary step, but still not enough to stay within our rapidly dwindling carbon budget. Some existing fossil fuel licences and production will need to be revoked and phased out early. Governments need to start tackling head-on how to do this in a fair and equitable way, which will require overcoming opposition from fossil fuel interests.”

Kelly Trout, at Oil Change International, the other lead author of the work, said: “Our study reinforces that building new fossil fuel infrastructure is not a viable response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The world has already tapped too much oil and gas.”

The study did not estimate how much CO2 could be removed from the atmosphere by technology in future. “These technologies are unproven at scale,” said Muttitt. “There’s a lot of talk about them, but we believe it would be a mistake to predicate achieving climate goals on these being delivered at a very large scale. We just don’t know whether it will be possible in terms of financing or governance.”

Maeve O’Connor, at the Carbon Tracker thinktank, the author of a new report, said: “Oil and gas companies are gambling on emissions [reducing] technologies that pose a huge risk to both investors and the climate. Most of these technologies are still at an early stage of development, with few large projects working at anything like the scale required by company goals, while solutions that involve tree planting require huge areas of land.”

Shut down fossil fuel production sites early to avoid climate chaos, says study | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

More children are likely to suffer from lethal undernutrition as the war in Ukraine threatens to deepen a global food crisis, UNICEF says. 

An increasing number of children are likely to die from “severe wasting” as the price of food and life-saving treatment rises, UNICEF warned in a new report on Tuesday.

“The world is rapidly becoming a virtual tinderbox of preventable child deaths and child suffering from wasting,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell in a statement.

The effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing damage due to climate change, are causing a “spiraling global food crisis,” the UN agency for children warned.

In a new “Child Alert” report, UNICEF said 600,000 more children may miss out on essential treatment, which are packs containing high-energy paste made of ingredients including peanuts, oil, sugar and added nutrients.

It said the price of raw materials for the ready-to-eat packs to bring malnourished children back to health had risen by 16%. UNICEF would need extra funding to make up the difference.

“For millions of children every year, these sachets of therapeutic paste are the difference between life and death. A 16% price increase may sound manageable in the context of global food markets, but at the end of that supply chain is a desperately malnourished child, for whom the stakes are not manageable at all,” said Russel.

Severe wasting is the most visible and deadly form of malnutrition. It is accompanied by repeated bouts of illness that compromise a child’s immune system. This means that common childhood illnesses that youngsters would normally overcome can prove fatal. Currently, there are 13.5 million children under the age of five who are suffering from it. The problem had already worsened before Russia’s invasion because of lingering disruptions to supply chains resulting from COVID-induced shutdowns of factories and ports. At least 2 in 3 children who are severely malnourished do not have access to ready-to-use therapeutic food, according to UNICEF.

UNICEF warns of more child deaths as food costs soar | News | DW | 17.05.2022

  The richest 10% of the world population owns 76% of the wealth, while the poorest half owns just a sliver, according to the World Inequality Lab.

 The UK government’s “jet zero” plan to eliminate carbon emissions from aviation relies on unproven or nonexistent technology and “sustainable” fuel, and is likely to result in ministers missing their legally binding emissions targets, according to a report from Element Energy.

The study from Element Energy says instead of focusing on such unreliable future developments, ministers should work to reduce the overall number of flights and halt airport expansion over the next few years. It comes as five regional airports are in the process of seeking approval to expand. In addition, Gatwick and Luton have announced they will be submitting major applications later this year, while Heathrow has not abandoned its plans for a third runway.

The report adds weight to concerns about the viability of the government’s plans, stating that it is unclear how the Department for Transport would “deliver the technological improvements” it was relying on in terms of sustainable fuel and aircraft efficiencies. It concluded that ministers should instead aim to reduce the number of flights now – halting airport expansion plans, expanding carbon pricing and taxing frequent flyers and kerosene.

The Aviation Environment Federation (AEF) policy director, Cait Hewitt, said the findings showed the government’s plan amounted to “sitting back and allowing both airports and emissions to grow in the short term while hoping for future technologies and fuels to save the day”.

“These expansion plans will generate millions of tonnes of additional CO2 each year,” she added. “Until the government sets out a realistic net zero trajectory for the sector, and the industry is on track to outperform it, additional airport capacity should be off the agenda.”

Johnson’s ‘jet zero’ plan unrealistic and may make UK miss CO2 targets – report | Airline emissions | The Guardian

 Apologising for sounding “apocalyptic”, Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England governor has warned the war in Ukraine was affecting food supplies.

Benzene is a known carcinogen that is highly toxic. 

An estimated 6.1 million people in the US live within three miles of a refinery, with low-income people and people of color represented at rates nearly twice that of the general population.

A dozen US oil refineries last year exceeded the federal limit on average benzene emissions. Among the 12 refineries that emitted above the maximum level for benzene, five were in Texas, four in Louisiana, and one each in Pennsylvania, Indiana and the US Virgin Islands, a new analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project revealed.

Out of 129 operable oil refineries in 2021, 118 reported benzene concentration registered at or near the site, otherwise known as the fence-line. Nearly half of these refineries released benzene levels above 3 micrograms per cubic meter, which the Environmental Integrity Project defines as a long-term potential health threat. The EPA requires facilities to take action if they exceed an average 9 micrograms per cubic meter, or above “action level” emission of benzene.

Marathon Petroleum’s Galveston Bay refinery in Texas City had the highest average net benzene levels in 2021, according to the analysis of the self-reported data. Roughly 37,000 people live within a three-mile radius of the refinery. Among them, 62% are people of color and 47% are low-income. 

“This analysis provides important insight into why the Houston area is an industrial cancer hotspot,” said Leticia Gutierrez of advocacy group Air Alliance Houston.

“People living near these facilities have greater exposure to lifetime cancer risk than any other part of the state, yet the regulatory agencies responsible for protecting us continue to approve permits for these facilities,” Gutierrez said.

Environmental Integrity Project notes that its analysis did not measure concentrations of benzene within neighborhoods adjacent to refineries, and does not reflect the actual levels of benzene within the communities.

US oil refineries spewing cancer-causing benzene into communities, report finds | Pollution | The Guardian

 The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) first strategy paper on overseas assistance since the merged department was formed and large-scale cuts were implemented in 2020,  has been condemned as a “double whammy to the world’s poor”.

It is dominated by a near halving of UK aid to multilateral bodies, including the UN the World Bank, and a renewed focus on aid as an adjunct to trade.

The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, claimed that reliable private sector investments will challenge “malign actors” and bring countries into the orbit of free market economies, a clear reference to the challenge posed by China’s large aid programme.

The 20-page development paper sets out the high-level goal of cutting the proportion of UK aid going to multilateral bodies from 40% of the budget to 25% by 2025. 

The UK aid budget has been cut by £4bn since 2020. The UK has already cut £1.5bn from a World Bank programme to help poor countries recover from Covid.

Sarah Champion, chair of the Commons international development committee, said: “The foreign secretary’s strategy has two main thrusts. It advocates aid for trade – linking the provision of aid to access for UK goods and services. And it says more of our money should go on direct government-to-government spending rather than spending through international bodies such as the United Nations. I fear that adds up to a double whammy against the global poor.” She added: “Supporting the poorest in the world should not be conditional on a trade deal or agreeing to investment partnerships. The UK has rightly been hugely critical of China for such an approach, so I fail to see why we are following down the same road. It is depressing and disappointing that the UK would devise a strategy like this.”

UK’s new aid strategy condemned as ‘double whammy to world’s poor’ | Global development | The Guardian