North Carolina Calls Tobacco a Crop in Jeopardy, 1987

"Tobacco Farmers Face Tough Choices" by Ferrel Guillory in the April 5, 1987 issue of the New York Times

North Carolina tobacco farmers have grown accustomed to antismoking campaigns, but they do not expect discouraging words from their own state government. So it was something extraordinary when the State Goals and Policy Board called tobacco a ''crop whose future is in jeopardy.''

The board, an advisory body, urged the state earlier this year to get busy helping farmers grow fruits or vegetables, as opposed to tobacco. ''We conclude,'' it said, ''that either with the gradual elimination of tobacco through decreased demand, or with the swift destruction of the crop by removal of Government supports, the result for the tobacco farmer would be the same: The choice is, as it were, between death by starvation or death by hanging.''

In a state that grows two-thirds of the nation's flue-cured tobacco, the principal ingredient in cigarettes, no high officials rushed to embrace the report. Gov. James G. Martin, a Republican, has proposed three ''agricultural parks'' where farmers could not only market fruits and vegetables, bypassing the middleman, but would also have access to processing facilities. Lieut. Gov. Robert B. Jordan 3d, a Democrat, proposed a rural economic development corporation to stimulate both farming and small business.

Considerable crop diversification has already taken place in the tobacco belt of the Southeast. North Carolina, for example, has become a major producer of sweet potatoes and turkeys, and tobacco now brings in only a quarter of cash farm receipts, $700 million, down from $1.1 billion in 1980. ''We average 3,000 fewer farmers each year, many of them tobacco farmers who have simply been squeezed out,'' said the board.

Still, across the rural Southeast, tobacco farms dot the landscape. Farmers have just begun transplanting seedlings from nursery beds into rows in the ground, by hand. Tobacco has always been a labor-intensive enterprise, although gawky mechanical pickers now harvest about half the crop.