Au Malawi, les jeunes enfants travaillent dans les plantations de tabac
Published on 25 août 2009 by La Rédaction in Santé0
On ignore le nombre exacte des milliers d’enfants qui travaillent dans les plantations de tabac au Malawi. Ce sont des enfants orphelins pour la plupart. Le Malawi compte un million d’orphelins, la moitié d’entre eux ayant perdu un parent ou les deux à cause du Sida et un orphelin sur dix est séropositif dans ce pays. La situation de ces enfants empoisonnés par la nicotine alors qu’ils sont déjà fragilisés est très préoccupante.
Plus de 4 millions de personne, dont plus d’un million sont des enfants de moins de cinq ans ou des femmes enceintes, sont victimes de la crise alimentaire persistante qui secoue le Malawi depuis des décennies. L’insécurité alimentaire est non seulement un facteur majeur de malnutrition, mais elle a également accru les risques de maladies telles que le choléra et le Sida. Selon l’Unicef, près de la moitié de la population du Malawi lutte pour survivre avec moins de 1 dollar par jour.
Près de 2 pour cent des naissances vivantes entraînent la mort de la mère. Le VIH/Sida touchant près d’un million de personnes, le pourcentage des mères infectées qui transmettent le virus à leur bébé est proche d’un tiers. Il y a plus de 83 000 enfants séropositifs au Malawi, selon les chiffres officiels. Il y a plus d’un million d’orphelins, la moitié d’entre eux ont perdu un au moins de leurs parents à cause du Sida.
Les enfants orphelins et les filles connaissent des problèmes de maltraitance, d’exploitation sexuelle et de travaux forcés dans des champs de tabac où ils sont empoisonnés quotidiennement par la nicotine. Un jour dans une plantation de tabac équivaut à la consommation de 50 cigarettes par jour, selon le rapport de l’association Plan intitulé « Travail difficile, salaire ridicule, longues heures de labeur ».
- Reuters The Guardian
- , Friday June 13 2008
By Gilles Castonguay
MILAN, June 13 (Reuters) - He might not smoke, but an Italian geneticist is convinced that tobacco can make the world a cleaner place by helping to reduce air pollution.
After years of research, Corrado Fogher and his team has turned oil from the plant's seeds into a biofuel to run everything from water boilers to power generators.
With this discovery, his biotechnology firm, Plantechno Srl, is contributing to a growing body of scientific research into clean and renewable sources of energy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels such as oil and coal.
"I think it holds a lot of promise," Fogher, the firm's founder and research director, told Reuters by phone on Friday.
With the rise in oil and gasoline prices and growing concern about harmful emissions from cars and trucks, biofuels made from corn and other plants have become a fashionable alternative.
Biofuels have also become controversial in light of soaring food prices, with critics calling on farmers to focus on filling stomachs rather than fuel tanks.
One of the advantages of Plantechno's variant of the tobacco plant is that it would eliminate the need for farmers to displace food crops from their best land to grow it.
"The tobacco plant can grow on marginal land where you can't grow any other plants," said Fogher, 57.
Similar initiatives are being taken elsewhere in the world to avoid having farmers switch to biofuel crops.
In Norway, newsprint maker Norske Skogindustrier ASA is joining forestry companies to make diesel fuel from woody biomass. In the United States, Algenol Biofuels Inc. plans to make ethanol from algae.
There is also a push towards cellulosic ethanol, which comes from inedible products like wood chips, corn cobs and grasses.
But the challenge is to justify the cost of producing tobacco oil and other biofuels, according to Davide Tabarelli, head of Nomisma Energia, an Italian think tank in Bologna.
"The problem with all of these biofuels is to produce enough oil to make it economically viable," he said.
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Compared with other biofuel crops, tobacco is cheaper to grow and produces bigger yields, according to Fogher. For every hectare (2.5 acres) on which it is grown, two tonnes of oil can be extracted from its seeds, about twice as much as rape or soy.
As for the energy it produces, its net calorific value is 2.5 percent higher than those from other biofuel crops.
The oil can be used by itself for stationary motors like a power generator. As a biodiesel for vehicles, it has to be mixed with palm oil.
Based in Casalmaggiore, a town near Parma where prosciutto ham is made, Plantechno will let engineers test the fuel in October by running a one-megawatt hospital power generator.
It will also create a firm called SunSeed to commercialise the seeds with the help of private equity investors.
Fogher hopes to expand the oil's uses, perhaps into lubricants, once Plantechno gets permission from Italian authorities to grow genetically modified versions of the plant.
Tobacco's potential as a biofuel was discovered by accident while Fogher's team was working on other attributes of the plant for the treatment of Gaucher disease, a genetic disorder.
Asked whether he consumed tobacco in a more usual way, Fogher said he did not smoke.
"Tobacco is very toxic." (Editing by Peter Blackburn)
