Ep 9: How does Big Tobacco treat tobacco farmers?

About this episode

Welcome to season two of Deadly Industry: Challenging Big Tobacco, the podcast where we explore the tactics used by the tobacco industry as it pursues profit over health. In this first episode of the new season, Louis speaks with Professor Roy Maconachie and Dr. Pankhuri Agarwal about the experiences of farmers who produce tobacco leaf, in often exploitative conditions. In this wide-ranging discussion they consider how useful the concept of modern slavery is, how tobacco farmers can become trapped in cycles of debt and why child labour is still a part of the tobacco industry. They also explore the use of filmmaking as a tool for decolonising knowledge. Dr Pankhuri Agarwal is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bath. Her forthcoming book, Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India (Cambridge University Press), explores how anti-trafficking interventions such as rescue shape workers’ lives and their encounters with state bureaucracy and law. More information is available on her website. Professor Roy Maconachie is Professor of Natural Resources and Development in the University of Bath’s Department of Social & Policy Scien