The predominant type of tobacco used in the manufacture of most cigarettes over the last 100 years is variously known as Bright leaf, Virginia, or flue-cured tobacco. In the Copán Valley, producers consistently use the term “tabaco virginia,” to refer to the tobacco they produced for BAT. The term “Bright leaf” comes from the bright yellow color that characterizes this tobacco after curing. Bright leaf tobacco is produced by a combination of specially bred varieties, soil and weather conditions, and cultivation practices, especially post-harvest handling, including flue-curing, which entails curing the tobacco in tobacco ovens at temperatures of around 100– 130°F over 5–10 days, depending on ambient conditions. Legend has it that the flue curing process was initially discovered by accident on a North Carolina tobacco plantation in 1839 by a slave who fell asleep while fire-curing tobacco (yet another curing technique) and hastily added charcoal to a dying fire. The increased heat and absence of smoke turned the leaf a bright yellow. The mild flavor of the resulting product fetched a high price at the local tobacco auction, and Bright leaf tobacco was born. BAT imported US “technical experts” – in fact North Carolina tobacco farmers – to transfer the technique of producing flue-cured tobacco to local Copán farmers.
241Social and Environmental Impacts of the Rise and Fall of Flue-Cured Tobacco Production
These Carolina farmers, most of whom lacked university educations and whose expertise was born of hard experience, trained the first cadre of contract farmers for BAT. Later, in the 1960s, BAT brought university-educated Americans to the Copán Valley as well as sponsoring the training of Honduran technicians at the Pan American Agriculture School in Zamarano, Honduras, and in the United States. Many former tobacco growers recall with great happiness this “golden age” when American tobacco farmers (and later technicians) were living in Copán, and Copanecos often traveled to the United States for business and pleasure at company expense. Several factors contribute to flue-cured tobacco’s high labor intensity: (1) tobacco is initially germinated in specially prepared seed beds and then hand-transplanted into the field about 45–60 days after germination; (2) the crop is susceptible to a number of pests and diseases which require close monitoring for their control; (3) plants must be topped and suckers removed to ensure quality crop – operations until very recently performed entirely by hand; (4) tobacco leaves are easily bruised in the field, lowering their quality and price, hence it is difficult to introduce machinery into the fields once the crop has reached a certain height; (5) harvest occurs over a protracted period as, on average, only three to four leaves per plant are “ripe” and thus harvested at any one time, requiring multiple passes through the fields over a 5–7 week period (Hawks 1970, p. 185); (6) the flue-curing process itself is labor intensive and requires near-continual supervision; and (7) cured tobacco must be hand sorted into various grades prior to sale. In the US South, slavery and later share cropping and wage labor took care of the labor requirements of tobacco production. In the Copán Valley, the demand for labor was met by a resident, landless population of agricultural laborers living in virtual serfdom on the lands of prosperous tobacco growers. Labor was controlled and disciplined by denying access to land ownership, making households dependent on the local owner, or patrón, for wages and access to land. Tobacco in Copán is cultivated in the dry season (October–May) under irrigation. Once the crop is out of the field, tobacco growers formerly made the land available to loyal workers at low or no cost for the cultivation of maize and beans in the rainy season for household subsistence. The provision of land was part of the “compensation package” received by landless laborers, who generally earned very low wages. Many of these laborers were descendents of the Chortí Maya whose traditional territory extends from the Copán Valley into Eastern Guatemala (Wisdom 1940). These impoverished workers later formed the bases for the successful ethnopolitical movement discussed below. Besides the labor problem, flue-curing requires considerable heat to maintain the interior of the oven at a temperature over 100°F day and night for up to a week. In the Copan Valley, firewood from the surrounding hills was the predominant fuel used for the ovens. It is difficult to quantify the amount of firewood used in the curing of tobacco. Local measures of firewood are not standardized. Growers and technicians spoke of “tareas” of firewood, with each tarea equal to 8–10 “cargas” (the amount a mule can haul, generally around 200 pounds) with each carga composed of about 500 pieces of firewood. Also, “una horneada” – one oven’s worth of tobacco—is not a fixed measure. The size of ovens, the heating system,