Machinga, Malawi - Under a scorching sun, 62-year-old William Mose kept on pacing up and down to a stream to collect water for his withered tobacco nursery.
"The rains have been lazy this year, otherwise I will keep on watering the nursery until the crop is ready for planting," Mose, a water can in hand, said at his village in Malawi's southern district.
Mose has grown this impoverished southern African country's chief export, dubbed "green gold" here, for the past four years.
"I can't quit growing tobacco. Without tobacco, my family would be doomed... Malawi would also be doomed," he said.
Tending only an acre of the crop, Mose still smiled all the way to the bank this year. He sold only two bales of thin-leafed burley tobacco and netted 35 000 kwacha (R2 519).
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It's money rarely seen in one of Africa's poorest countries where the majority of citizens survive on less than a dollar a day.
"I am very happy this year because I have never realised this type of money in my lifetime. If I had grown more tobacco, I could have been richer and afford to buy iron sheets for my house," Mose said.
But the World Health Organisation (WHO) wants farmers like Mose - one of 300 000 small-scale growers in Malawi - to replace tobacco farming with economically viable alternatives.
The task is immense. Tobacco growing has shifted to developing countries like Malawi where the crop fetches 70 percent of its foreign currency earnings and employs close to half-a-million people.
But the WHO argues that farmers face long-term losses from selling to a non-open market regulated by the tobacco industry and illnesses associated with growing the crop, not to mention problems of child labour and environmental degradation.
Experts researching the proposal - which falls under the WHO framework convention on tobacco control (FCTC) - acknowledge the challenges and expect resistance.
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