Informant38

The subsidy system was set up to guarantee a supply of affordable food for Europe by paying for production.
It is absurd that tobacco should have been included in this system at all.

The EU has 1,000 tobacco growers and is the world's fifth largest tobacco producer, with 75% of its crop being grown in Greece and Italy.

Smoking kills an estimated 500,000 Europeans a year yet EU farmers are paid ?5,250 ($9,300) a hectare to grow tobacco. Wheat farmers receive ?240 ($425) a hectare.
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Payments based on quantities of crops are being replaced in most cases with smaller flat payments linked to environmental issues. For cotton, olive oil and hops, all aid will stop being linked to production from 2006. All tobacco subsidies will be withdrawn by 2010.
It was one of the issues out-standing on the first major reform of the union's ?30bn ($53 billion) subsidy system - half of all EU spending.
Sugar remains the last major sector needing to be brought into the new system - a contentious issue for Britain because of the sugar beet combines of East Anglia.

Ian Black,Paul Brown/Guardian UK Apr.23.04

Compared to the strength and resolution necessary to wage a successful resistance to the oil/automobile combine - whose products and livelihood are nightmarishly more damaging to all of us, to all life - the anti-smoking campaign, as successful as it is, seems almost petulant.