“Tobacco lady” … struggles without guarantees

Johnny’s sands wrote in “Call of the Homeland”:

The southern tobacco ladies are implanted in the fields, the bitter tobacco seedlings, perhaps they implanted with them part of their lost rights, as the state has never been fair to them, until the moment did not legislate a law that they protect by registering them in a health security.

The cultivated area south decreased, it declined a very large percentage, and after the border villages constituted the backbone of tobacco transplantation, the war destroyed it, and whoever decided to grow does not constitute 30 % of the percentage of farmers in the south.

The high cost of agriculture, in addition to the high cost of labor and its loss, has pushed to water scarcity and a decrease in the price of a kilo of tobacco from $ 14 before the economic crisis to 7 dollars today, many farmers to give up this agriculture permanently.

Hoda, one of the farms in the southern town of Adchit, is busy with the castle of tobacco with a number of her colleagues, as she spent the years of her youth in this agriculture. A long time has passed since the injustice followed them, as the state did not think of protecting that good workforce, perseverance and essence, by registering it in the guarantee so that it can get the medicine.

Women in the field spend more than 8 hours, start with dawn and end in the middle of the day. Despite the difficulty of this agriculture, these women did not think about abandoning them, because as they say: “There is no alternative, we want to live.”

Latifa sits Tarhi Al -Sakalah, after just ending tobacco cultivation, her cigarette smokes, perhaps she forgets her concerns, saying: “If I get sick, I do not have the price of treatment, or stay at home to die, then the guarantee is not available to us, is this not really for us?”

There is no clear future for smoke cultivation in the south, in light of the low prices and the rise in the cost of production, the risks of war were also added, while the government has not made any solution that gives the farmer the right to continue to instill the seedlings.

Adchit, Zurat Weshmar was considered the largest of smoke cultivation villages in the Nabatiyeh area. Today, the 30 percent number does not exceed, and the reason, according to the farmer, Ahmed Safa, “we are unable to endure the high costs, and if the matter remains like this, the seedlings will disappear after two years.”

In one of the tobacco fields in the eastern town of Zurat, this town, whose share of the bombing and destruction continued, Wafa Ismail continues as many women, their work in planting the seedlings, challenging the danger, weather and fatigue together, did not find a substitute for tobacco in its life, although it has become “without value”, what it demands is fulfillment is the health and social guarantee, and this is a right, if we suffer from a health problem.

The state must know that women are the backbone of this agriculture, and most of the farmers are the elderly, you do not find young people who are planted, as they do not like them, and therefore if the hand of women lose, agriculture has ended, some farmers use the Syrian labor to fill the deficiency, and thus tobacco cultivation in front of an existential danger, without women there is no future for this agriculture.