According to John Kapito, Executive Director of the Consumer Association of Malawi, his country's economy is "completely influenced by the tobacco industry." Local subsidiaries of three American tobacco leaf merchants purchase virtually all of Malawi’s tobacco- Stancom (Standard Commercial Corporation, North Carolina), Dimon (Dimon Corporation, Virginia), and Limbe Leaf (Universal Leaf Tobacco Corporation, Virginia). The subsidiaries are part of a complex system of transnational corporations that engage in trading in tobacco, and the manufacturing, and marketing of tobacco products.

World Health Organization reports that over four million lives are lost each year to tobacco-related diseases. Tobacco companies earn profits by not only producing an addictive and lethal product, but also by using a mix of strategies, such as providing loans to local producers for fertilizers, pesticides and machinery, expanding tobacco cultivation, pressuring for the elimination of price support systems, spending millions of dollars designing cigarettes containing less tobacco, and playing off countries against each other. Corporations are also active in obstructing international trade policies that restrict tobacco trading, and blocking tobacco control initiatives that would stem corporate-backed smuggling of tobacco products and the global marketing of tobacco products.