Ep 9: How does Big Tobacco treat tobacco farmers?

Research Group at the University of Bath hosted by me, Louis Lawrence.

“We are an international research group that investigates the tactics used by Big Tobacco”

to maximise its profits at the expense of public health. The evidence we produce helps society to hold this deadly industry to account. Coming back to this idea of debt bondage, that is one of the ways that Big Tobacco companies trap poor farmers in these cycles of debt bondage and these cycles of poverty continue.

They are not directly being coerced into doing this kind of labor, but there is no other option for them. If you enjoy listening, then please subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast. When we think about the global tobacco industry, we often picture Big Tobacco, the companies

that sell the cigarettes, their glossy advertisements, slick corporate branding and well-known products. What we may not think about is where the tobacco leaf comes from. Smallholder farms in countries like Malawi, where farmers work grueling hours and a difficult conditions, often trapped in cycles of debt and unable to make a profit.

In this first episode of the new season, we look at the hidden costs of tobacco production. How in modern forms of slavery are embedded in its supply chains, what role the history of colonialism plays in this modern day problem, and how these exploitative working practices

“expand beyond tobacco and into other global industries?”

Joining us are two experts from the University of Bath, Roy McConaughey, Professor of Natural

Resources and Development and Director of the Powerful Documentary Tobacco Slave, and Dr.

Pankuri Agawal, who researches the lived experience of marginalised workers in global supply chains. Welcome Roy and Pankuri. Hi. Thank you.

So let's begin with the big picture. May be first to you, Pankuri. What do we mean when we use the term modern slavery in the context of global industries? Thank you, Lewis. I think that's a very, very big question.

So I will try to be as brief and coherent as I can. So I do understand the emotional appeal of the term modern slavery. There is so much going on with respect to modern slavery. It's not just that modern slavery in business has been exposed and is discussed in media reports, but you also have online apps, games, books, movies, actually drawing in a larger

part of the global audience to believe that there is a big huge problem called modern slavery across the world in different industries.

“I think I would like to break this down into two parts.”

First of all, the term modern slavery itself, it can encapsulate anything and everything.

And that is where the problem lies because first of all, historical slavery and what is term to modern slavery today in terms of how exploitation functions today, it's not the same. Historically, when people were enslaved and transported, they didn't move because they wanted to better their lives for economic reasons or for other reasons.

They were made to move in extremely inhuman conditions in ships and they were tied and they were made to work on plantation farms against their will. So the motivation there was not to better their lives in moving from wherever they lived to working on plantation farms. But today a lot of people who move and who are termed as modern slaves actually move on

migrate to better their economic lives. They may experience or they do experience exploitative conditions in factories, in farms, even in homes as domestic workers, but they do that to better their conditions. So it is a bit disrespectful and also a disservice to the histories and the stories of the formerly enslaved to use the term modern slavery today.

Secondly and more logically, when we hear the term modern slavery, it sort of very much oversimplifies the problem. You think of modern slavery, you see a movie or a documentary and there are like three standard characters. You have the victim, you have the savior who is going to save the victim and then there

is a criminal. So as long as you use the term modern slavery, you are actually trying to pinpoint the problem to one criminal organization or to an individual and you want to punish that of a person.

You are not looking at why people worked in the exploitative conditions in the first place.

Maybe they had a lot of debt going on, maybe they were poor, maybe the companies that they work for do not even provide them basic wages. None of that discussion comes into the picture most of the times. It is about catching the criminal, putting the criminal behind prison bars or whatever and saving the victim.

So there is a whole savior narrative that comes with the term modern slavery. So that is the second problem with the term modern slavery itself. So my, I would invite your audience to actually reflect on when they look at media articles

What does that invite the audience, anyone to actually do about modern slavery?

It's, is it a disservice to the formerly enslaved? Is it actually taking away focus from a lot of underlying issues that should be solved

“so that every worker in the world can have a dignified life and a dignified work life?”

If it is not doing all of that, then there is some problem with the terminology of modern slavery itself. In your view, then what's the more appropriate term for exploited workers? Is that a more appropriate term for people in exploitation, forced labor? It depends on the context as well.

So for example, in India and even in Malawi where people are entrapped by cycles of debt. So they take a lot of debt, which does not mean the same as what we understand by what

debt means in the Western context, debt can also have very informal kinship-based connotations.

So for example, in India, there is a practice of debt bondage. That is the appropriate term there, because people keep working generation from generation in the same farms for the same employer and they are not even paid the money, because the debt and the interest on that debt keeps growing, right? So the debt bondage is a more appropriate term.

IELO and other organizations use the term forced labor, which also will invite, if you use the term forced labor, we have to ask what are the interventions it is inviting. So the answer to the question of what is the appropriate term depends on seeing what kind of interventions it is spawning.

“If you use modern slavery, is it like criminal intervention that is being encouraged?”

If you use the term forced labor, is it encouraging states, corporates, and civil society

to actually look at underlying labor issues that should be addressed? And then it is obviously context-specific as well. You have debt bondage and you have other historical forms of exploitation that exist even today. So I think there is no one answer to what is the best terminal logic to use here.

It depends on what terminal logic is allowing you to look at the underlying conditions that have actually enabled exploitative practices to persist. Thanks, Ben Curry. So thinking about these underlying conditions in practice, Roy, how does this kind of exploitative labor practices present in the, itself, in tobacco production?

So yeah, thank you, Louie. I mean that was very eloquently put by Pine Curry, that was a very,

“I think, very good description of this sort of controversy in the differences in the subtleties”

and the nuances we have to understand between these different terminologies. I guess a theme throughout a lot of my work is looking at labor exploitation. And we can trace with many commodities which are grown or produced in Africa for consumption elsewhere most of the time. We can see these patterns that sort of were perhaps initiated during colonial times being

replicated in new forms and modern forms. I guess it was 2020 we started talking about the idea of making a film looking at labor exploitation in tobacco. And I think the film for those listeners who might be interested in seeing in more detail how labor exploitation really plays out in the tobacco sector in Malawi, our film is available

online and I think it does a far better job of explaining the situation. It's local farmers talking about these practices and how they're affected individually. Again, I think coming back to this idea of debt bondage, that is one of the ways that big tobacco companies trap poor farmers in these cycles of debt bondage and these cycles of poverty continue.

They give them loans for inputs and they have to pay back the loans with tobacco. They often don't make any profit after they pay back the loans so they become trapped in the situation where they're not directly being coerced into doing this kind of labor, but there's no other options for them. So there's been discussions around diversifying the economy and tobacco producing countries

in Africa, but often there's no market there. There's all kinds of reasons why this isn't happening, but we see the same story repeating again with the tobacco industry in African countries, I think. You've used the term input in reference to debt bondage, what does that actually mean? So tobacco growing requires certain inputs at such as seed fertilizer, pesticides, things

that generally aren't available to farmers and they have to purchase them. So when I'm talking about inputs, I'm talking about all this sort of inputs in terms of the food, sorry, the tobacco production. And this is your film Tobacco Slave, which I definitely recommend listeners to go and see if they haven't already.

You mentioned this, the cycle of debt has pancurated as well, that the traps farmers and

put it, is it the tobacco companies, some of which are based here or is it of a company who's kind of intermediaries? So we've got the big tobacco companies which are buying the leaf from these producing countries, but they sort of remain at an arms length because they don't want to be directly implicated in these kinds of exploitative practices.

So what happens is that farmers sell to an intermediary in Malawi, we have an organization called Limbe leaf or Alliance One, these are leaf buying companies who very much control production and the market. Farmers don't have any other opportunities really to sell their product anywhere else. So they have to sign a contract with these leaf buying companies, they have to take the

inputs and then they basically most of the profit that they would make goes to paying back

the leaf buying company. The leaf buying company then sells on their tobacco products to big companies like Imperial Brown. So it's quite, it's interesting how it works and it's all very formalized as well. So other commodities that I've looked at in Africa, like cobalt or gold, these kinds

of relationships are very informal in Sierra Leone with diamond mining. I can give you an example. We have what's referred to as a tribute or support to relationship where you have a supporter who's financing a group of laborers and they're not being paid anything unless they recover a diamond.

So many of them don't ever find a big diamond and they're always trapped in the cycle.

“What is this very informal relationship with the tobacco sector?”

We have a formal relationship in place and it's very difficult, as I said, for these farmers to get out of these relationships once they get on that path. In terms of filmmaking itself, what is it by making films about these issues that you think is such an effective way of addressing some of these stories? I have the visual arts background actually.

So before I was an academic, I started out working as a documentary photographer and I was doing a lot of work in Africa, my work was becoming more sort of concerned with development issues. So I made the decision at one point to go back to university, and I ended up doing a master's degree.

I ended up doing a PhD and I got on this completely different path from this one decision that I made.

“But the visual side, the visual storytelling is still very important to me in my work and”

I always use the camera, I come back to that and I find it a really powerful way of translating

what I do with my academic work into something that I can share with a very wide audience. So policy makers will watch a film that I make, governments will watch a film, whereas an academic article they might not want to read that or a book, but something that's very accessible or just for the general public, even, means I can share my work much more widely.

So my films are really about disseminating the work, but I also use them for advocacy as well. It's a very good way to disseminate the work and share it with a wide audience. In international development work, there's been a lot of discussion recently around the idea of decolonizing knowledge, giving people an opportunity to represent themselves on their own terms and give them a voice.

There's been criticism of so-called experts from the global north going into poor communities and extracting knowledge and thinking that they know what's best for communities. I like using film because it gives local people a chance to actually speak for themselves and it gives them a platform to, for their voices and that's really important to me in terms of how I approach my own work.

Thank you very much. Good point to come to your research, obviously, about the lived experience of work. What's your take on this kind of discussion around decolonizing knowledge and how we represent

“narratives of the people who are actually living these lives?”

Again, a very loaded question. I think Roy is right and there is a long history in academics as well and it is disciplines about what colonization and then post colonization and now decolonization. How do you articulate that, represent and write about it, but also how you discuss it and how you practice it and I think what Roy's film when I watched it, what struck me was not

only was it very well researched because it brings the past, present and sort of future insights together in a way that actually comes from the workers themselves, but it also sort of brings in the insights from other people. But I think what the film does in terms of actually decolonizing is that it captures it very visually, so there is a ruffle of tobacco leaves.

There are remnants of broken slippers there, so it very, very visually shows the viewers

tobacco industry.

“So I think that is a very good example of decolonization.”

I believe in the UK and in some other places for the past few years, there has been a movement

to recognize the UK's responsibility and its hand in practicing advancing and benefiting from the slave trade itself and a lot of universities are actually also doing a research to see what are the linkages of historical slavery to their university. For example, if a certain building was built by the formerly enslaved, if a building of a university was actually funded by the labor of the formerly enslaved and so on.

So I think there are some efforts, but I think it's not enough. And I also believe that sometimes it can be a bit wishy-washy in terms of setting up committees on decolonization and setting up committees on DEIs, but not having discussions like these. So what do we do as researchers and especially researchers who are from and based in the

global north, which can be both white and other researchers and what's the responsibility

there. That's where a rising movement also around ethics and how you do research, how you write research, how you talk about research comes in.

“But I don't think we are anywhere near to what decolonization means and I think in the”

current political environment, we are not going to get any closer as well. So unfortunately, that's all I can say, but there's a lot to be said and a separate podcast on decolonization itself. Absolutely, perhaps a whole number of future episodes. In terms of your research, are you going into the field in a similar way to Roy and what

are the some of the challenges of doing this kind of research with these sort of marginalized communities?

So my work over the past 10 years has been to understand the aftermath of modern slavery

intervention. What is happening to people after they are rescued from whatever so-called modern slavery situations? What is happening to people after corporate, corporate stake action against modern slavery, which can be as vague as publishing modern slavery statements on their website.

In fact, our university also has on their website a modern slavery statement, but what does that actually mean? You go and see the language of the statement. It doesn't really tell you how we are in double code, slavery, in any sense, because we still don't know what the links of this university are to the slave trade.

So what's the point of publishing those statements, right? So I'm interested in what modern slavery does in terms of encouraging interventions that do not actually benefit the concerned workers. So that is where I'm coming from. The terminology of modern slavery, the interventions and generates and why those interventions

don't work and therefore critique in the terminology. Within this I have worked with various communities, whether it's informal sector communities like sex workers and brick-kill workers in India or government factory workers in the UK. The most recent work I did as part of a team where my research is based at the University of Bath was looking at the aftermath of the 2020 booze candle.

And your question there about the challenge? You just explained what that's kind of was. Yes, sure. So the in 2020 the times did an undercover expozy of a few factories in Lester in the UK where a lot of South Asian workers work.

And the expozy said that there is modern slavery in Lester and the community is responsible for practicing modern slavery but also the community is victim of modern slavery. So me and another research researcher went to Lester in 2023 and we wanted to see what is what has happened to the community. So who was saved after the scandal and what happened to the workers?

And one of the findings was that it didn't help anyone because as long as as soon as the expozy came out the factories were closed, the factories were raided and closed, boo-hoo cut ties with the suppliers so boo-hoo did not even take responsibility for actually doing something about improving working conditions. And I think that's where the ethical dilemmas come in as a researcher because communities

like these can be over-researched by multiple researchers. So there how do you even one be mindful of not over-researching but do also not just go and research and come back and then do nothing. How do you keep engaging with the community?

“And I think that's very important ethical dilemmas is because a lot of universities also”

don't support that after of research. If I want to keep engaging with the community, I want to support the community for example

of support in universities because everything has to be researched and there is some impact

funding of course but it's very difficult to justify why you want to keep engaging with the community after you have collected data and come back and return your journal articles and made impact by publishing journal articles.

“Coming back to the filmmaking, I think this is one of the reasons why I really enjoy an”

compassionate about making films from my research is that it allows a degree of impact to happen that goes beyond just the academic work that we do. So some of the films, the screenings from the tobacco slave film have been very well received. I think we did a screening in Kenya, we did one in Bristol, we did one in New York. And each time there's a different audience that views the film, they see different things

in the film which is really interesting I think.

So there's been sort of different thematic discussions around the film, you know, in all these different places that we've screened up. The film has been subtitled into a number of languages so it's being used for educational purposes and schools for all sorts of applications. And personally I feel a very strong moral obligation to, as I was saying before, to really

put the research I do to work and make sure that it goes beyond academia. Some of the work I've been doing on mining has been used to the films I've made in Sierra Leone, have been used by government to sort of inform a new artistic and mining policy that's been developed.

“So there is this application I think where film can be a very good way to influence and”

to make people see things differently really. So Roy, what are some of the impacts you hope for the film to have? What I hope the film will do is really stimulate this conversation around diversification. So it's about putting pressure on the big tobacco companies and holding them to account, but it's also about thinking how we can move away from these dependencies with some countries

on tobacco growing and think about other crops that are useful in the country where they're being grown, food consumption crops, many of these countries have food insecurity issues and they're growing these cash crops that are being sent abroad so companies can profit. There's a good example I think in recently that's taking place in Kenya, UN, sponsored initiative looking at diversification away from tobacco and they're encouraging farmers

to grow iron rich beans which are nutritious and there's a market for them.

“Again, I think a lot of the time the market is the problem and if you go on to a website”

of some of these big corporates certainly with tobacco, they'll be a corporate social responsibility page and they'll be showing all the wonderful things that they're doing for communities to support them in terms of education, in terms of growing additional crops. I think with the diversification particularly, there's no market support so people will go back to tobacco and in Malawi where the film takes place, there's a long, long history

of tobacco growing and it's not easy just to break away from it, it's a slow process I think. One point that's touched upon in the film, it's a tricky one I think but one that listeners will be interested in is this issue of child labor and I think it's for I expect Pankur you'll have some interesting things to say on this as well as Roy because this is one of the issues of definition, doesn't it, and how it's viewed by different lends.

Well, it's a very contentious issue isn't it because nobody wants to see children being exploited but there are these sort of cultural practices which happen in some countries where children are expected to contribute to the household economy so in many rural villages in Africa you'll see children on farms, you'll see them helping working alongside families doing light work and I think we can think of child labor as existing on a continuum at one end of the scale we've

got acceptable light work where children are being socialized where they're building relationships within their family and on the other hand we've got horrible situations where children are being exploited which no one would ever support obviously but you know I think you do have to sort of look at this continuum when we're thinking about is child labor acceptable in some situations I know it's it's a very debated question some people have a very you know a very

direct opinion on that with tobacco I think it's different because we have a crop that's a toxic crop that's making people who work with it ill so there's a sickness that people are getting called green tobacco sickness where when they handle the the green leaves they're actually ingesting nicotine through their skin and their hands and developing these malaria like symptoms, coughing, vomiting, headaches so I you know in that situation I would say you know

children should should never be even near a tobacco farm it's a it's a nasty crop all together but

I've seen situations in Africa where children have been doing work with their families or supporting

little bit of work they wouldn't be able to do that so this again this idea that education and child

“work can't go together is when we need to think about so again it comes I think back to terminology”

you know child labor child work acceptable for you know you'll probably have something interesting to say but I completely agree that it has to be seen as a continuum but more more like if we were to take a decolonial lens then the question has to be why are children working not that children are working this is wrong their parents are wrong because they're making them work let's shut down business and that's our responsibilities done as businesses or civil society or

whatever the question to ask is why are children working of course in the in the context of tobacco farming nobody can argue ever that children should be working under such head has our conditions but if you look at children's work globally and more so in the global south asking the question why children work is actually more appropriate because a lot of children work like Roy said to put them through school but also if I am a farmer or I am a construction worker

my employee does not pay me wages the school that the state is providing has no good quality education and I need to feed my family and I have children why won't I let my children work in on extra income like what benefit is it going to do to them if the state is not providing child care the state is not providing good quality education and there is also no hope for bettering one's condition by doing some sort of more skilled work and I use skilled in double codes here so

that's where the question lies why do children work and in what conditions they're working and asking this question actually takes us to the spectrum that Roy was mentioning that yes in tobacco farming children shouldn't be working it's his artists but in a lot of context children do work and they don't just work they put themselves through school they also pay for medical bills they also try to pay for the debt that their families have taken and therefore

the terminology of child labor versus children's work is so contested in different circles there's an interesting segment in the film in tobacco slave where we're speaking with a woman who is a single single mother she has four or five children she's tobacco farming and she just admits she says I know it's wrong as against the law my children should not be working on the tobacco farm with me but I need them and without them I couldn't do this work so I think you know

in some cases there's almost a gendered implication there that if children are not helping out with work then that extra burden will fall on to the woman who was often doing a lot of of the farming work you know Africa we talk about women is having a triple burden of labor they're doing domestic work they're doing productive work they're working in community so they're their time poor the

“this idea of time poverty is really important I think and the children are for this woman in the”

film anyway she she she was reliant on them and even though she felt terrible about it and you know wanted them to be in in school and and solution to that is not like why is this mother making

the children work the solution is to ask the tobacco company why can't you provide the mother

better wages and also provide her enough income so she can employ adults to work on the farm and help her in the farm that's the most logical thing to do actually we've got a short clip here from the documentary of one of the tobacco farmers that we've been talking about um this bottom I was born in 1953 I used to grow tobacco on live scale I had the at a certain time 10 tenants in Malawi we produce our tobacco manual don't use a machine no we use

our strength cultivating using holes 10 acts come with their families they don't leave their families behind they bring their families kids they say the children our hours let them help us so we see young kids very young at the age of 19 12 cultivating in the field of tobacco

these children want to go to school because they're always tired they're always tired

when we send them to school they go to school as they come back we say let's go to the field what are we doing why killing the future of the children is there a way out of that there's obviously responsibility that lies with these massive global corporations g- think there's a realistic way of encouraging or enforcing better practices from tobacco companies or other exploits

“to industries I think this requires a two-part answer because if you look at what the companies are”

doing to better working conditions for example they hire auditors so if there is an allegation

and they will say okay we we are going to employ third party auditors we're going to go to these

“sites and actually see if everything is right now the thing is a lot of companies expect”

the local workers or the local suppliers to actually also pay for this auditing and certification so the burden of actually having enough resources to actually ensure that there are better working conditions is also most often on the communities of suppliers and workers so that really is highly critiqued for its effectiveness and how much are corporates actually responsible for improving working conditions what what interventions they are doing and if those interventions are actually

helping the community or are they helping businesses to evade responsibility in any way but also there are some examples where things have worked out for example local community groups that actually bring together unions brands apply representatives work together with them to solve issues of unpaid wages and so on and so forth but those are far and few between so my pessimistic self would say that i don't see a business is taking responsibility anytime soon but we can't rely

and hope from smaller businesses maybe or from the move towards corporate social responsibility to see if anything positive comes out of all this discussion. She's thinking there's any more top dime kind of global regulation approach that could be taken to enforce more responsibility. I mean all the approaches so far if you look since the 1980s, 1990s when there was a lot of consumer and media pressure on companies to take some action are top down so you look at audits that are

imposed top down you look at certifications that are also top down but the problem is supply chains

are no longer linear so a part of your car like tigers are made in one country, the steering wheel is made in another country it is assembled in a third country so it's not even about top down it's about ensuring that every worker in every fragmented part of a global value chain is at least paid decent wages and then we can talk about health and safety and other things but if that is also not happening all the top down measures that I know of at least have not really worked that much

because companies have blanket policies and I think the modern slavery statement is a very good example you have this broad week language every company in the UK can publish it on their website but it doesn't even speak to the context or the realities or the needs of the workers in Malawi or in India or in any in Brazil for example so it's very very divorced from reality any top down approach so I don't have an answer to that. I think I mean the complexity of these supply chains

as you've just pointed out is something I think that companies used to their advantage in many ways

because they can sort of hide behind all of this complexity and they're not always directly

implicated in these things exactly and they can say oh the supplier is the criminal here he's the modern enslave or I am not because he did not do the audits but why did he not do the audits or he she or they because they didn't have the money to do audits it's your company it's your product

“you should pay for the audits in certifications you know if we look back to sort of historically”

an African countries they've always been told to compare their so-called comparative advantage and they've been told their rob mineral producers or they're growing crops for export and that's what they've done they there's very little value added they produce the stuff and it goes elsewhere where the profits are made which is exactly what we see happening with tobacco and I think a lot of these countries there you know they're so poor that they're desperate for foreign direct investment

and they will do anything to get companies to come in best so they will give tax holidays to companies they'll they'll say you know come in and use our labor we've got this cheap pool of labor there are no regulations our unions are weak environmental regulations you know we will look look beyond that and it gives them they're almost like they're giving these companies the keys to the shop and they're coming in and this is how that they really maximize profit and you know this

“needs to stop I think this it's a difficult situation but I think there is a real role for for”

governments to actually step up and provide much stronger stronger regulation and we see in many African countries where mining is happening we see governments now renegotiating mining contracts with big mining companies realizing that they've you know they've been exploited interesting you mentioned mining you obviously in your filmmaking and research seen a range of industries in Africa do you think there's anything unique about the way the tobacco industry operates in Africa I

mentioned this sort of formalization of these contracts with the leaf buying companies that that to me was quite surprising because it was so blatant and you know a lot of the time these things kind of happened under the table with other commodities but it's the same story you know it's the same story just being repeated with a different commodity I've done some working Ghana working

I think these ethical supply chains are we see them happening with many more commodities being

produced fair trade and you know when we buy fair trade product we assume that people are benefiting and their better working conditions are getting paid properly but speaking to these women there are all kinds of reasons why these benefits were not translating for them and a lot of them had to do with the realities of how things were on the ground with you know patriarchal systems with all kinds of things that are very difficult to change to an intervention so fair trade I mean

“you know it is very obviously it's a well-intentioned initiative but I think even even something”

like that often doesn't work because of there's all kinds of local reasons why they may not

actually map on to the local reality and a lot of companies when they use fair trade as a saving

sort of face they also expect consumers to actually take a lot of responsibility and in today's time when we are so de-sensitized to a lot of issues a lot of people may not care or a lot of people may not even have resources when I was a student I couldn't buy sustainable clothing I couldn't have bought fair trade coffee I didn't have the resources for that so I think there is also a disconnect between like what you said about top bottom in how these well-intentioned

interventions are designed but also how much divorced they can be at the same time from the realities of the workers but also the wider audience and I'm certainly not sorry I'm just just to clarify I'm

“not advocating for fair trade tobacco I think tobacco is a crop which can be growing you know so”

it's for me the solution is really about diversification away from tobacco but with many other

things that are being produced and grown you know these these ethical initiatives are important once I think and it's it's just a question of you know whether they're really working or not there are some good examples where these have worked in different contexts smaller there are best practices out there and lots of case studies that have worked but if you see it from a macro perspective it's that where hopelessness comes from because it's because with especially

with the rise and the increased stronger relationship between fascist governments and corporates it's going to be really tough to bring out any sort of large scale or expect to have any large scale macro sort of change in how supply chains function yeah I mean it's a bleak picked in some ways I'm thinking of people listening to this and thinking okay well fair trade maybe that's not so fair like is there something that individuals can do that's that's positive even if it's you

know even if they don't have the luxury of buying more ethical products even if a lot of us might be overwhelmed by the state of the world around us at the most basic level we can question we can ensure that we don't take knowledge for granted and that's where role of films like Royce film comes in wherein these films actually help you question things actually wonder like you know oh I've been believing this this is what tobacco companies do this is fair trade but

“is it actually fair trade is it really ethical so I think we can use more of our conscious or our”

brains in some way to actually just question even if you don't take any action even if you don't have the resources to participate in sustainable clothing or whatever we can act like question okay I'm being sold the idea of modern slavery but is it helping anyone so just like and we have so much at our disposal at our fingertips we have our phones we have so much like actually use that for questioning things at the very least so knowledge is power I hope so

Roy and Pankuri thank you very much for joining me thank you thank you to Roy and Pankuri for joining me today the sources for today's discussion can be found in the episode show notes including the link to watch the tobacco slave documentary we'll be back next time where we'll be joined by John Mehegan and Fred Dunwoody Sterton to talk in more detail about the tobacco supply chain see you next time

from the tobacco control research group you've been listening to season two of deadly industry challenging Big Tobacco hosted by Louis Lawrence produced by Kate White and edited by Sasha Goodwin the production manager is Jacqueline Oliver you can email us at [email protected] or find us on LinkedIn, blue sky and ex this is a University of Bath production