Interviews with dozens of tobacco workers in 2000 show that only a few workers received money for their labor in the 1998/1999 season (October to June). Those that received cash payments, earned an average of US$150 dollars for nine months of work, which was below the average annual individual income of US$190 dollars in the same year. Such low earnings are part of the local landscape in Malawi that boasts of one of world's highest levels of income inequality. Interviews also show that most workers received food as a form of payment and could not afford to purchase a pack of cigarettes priced at less than one U.S. dollar and manufactured in neighboring Zambia.

To meet basic living expenses, tobacco cultivators use a mix of employment strategies, including wage labor (contract labor or casual labor known locally as ganyu), tenancy, and smallholder farming. According to a 1993 United Nations/Government of Malawi study, tobacco producers represent the social group hardest hit by poverty. The country's human development indicators show literacy rates, access to safe water, and health services to be some of the lowest in the world. The rise of tobacco consumption in Malawi is adding pressure to a public health system that is struggling to eliminate diseases of poverty such as tuberculosis, measles, malaria, and cholera. Resources that have been diverted to fight the AIDS pandemic are being stretched even further to cope with the anticipated increases in tobacco related diseases.

Tobacco and the Environment Workers' low pay and poor health conditions are aggravated by use of fertilizers and pesticides. Harmful chemicals applied to tobacco plants also contribute to soil erosion and deforestation. According to Malawi's Forestry Department, about 700,000 cubic meters of forest are destroyed yearly to cure tobacco. It is estimated that one tree is consumed for every three hundred cigarettes produced. Workers and their families are suffering worsening environmental degradation due to more than one hundred years of tobacco cultivation that began when a gardener with the first Scottish mission planted Virginia tobacco in 1893.

Daily Life on Tobacco Farms In an interview with an illiterate tobacco worker in Nkhotakota District in central Malawi in August 2000, a worker recounted how he was recruited along with his wife and two children from his village in the southern region and transported hundreds of kilometers away to a tobacco farm. Unlike the experiences of workers on neighboring tobacco farms, his labor recruiter and new employer did not make him pay for transportation expenses. The worker entered into an oral agreement with a landlord to grow tobacco on one hectare of land and sell his tobacco to the farm owner. Part of the contract involved loan advances of seeds, fertilizers, hoes and food. The tenant built his family's ‘wattle and daub’ hut on his one-hectare plot (equivalent to two and half acres) on a thirty-five hectare estate with fifteen other tenants and their families. He was charged money for the supplies used to build his hut. The tenant stated that he regularly found casual work (ganyu) to earn money for food, clothes, and medicine for his children. Ganyu labor typically earned him less than one U.S. dollar for up to eight hours of work per day. In the 1998/1999 season, the tenant and his family earned less than one hundred U.S. dollars for producing five bales of burley tobacco, each weighing about one hundred kilograms, that were sold to global tobacco leaf merchants in Lilongwe.

For each kilogram of tobacco cultivated by the tenant, manufacturers can produce up to 1,400 American blend cigarettes. The Union of Tobacco Workers in Malawi In 1996, the Tobacco Tenant and Allied Worker’s Union was established and built its membership base to over 4,000 out of a potential of 15,000 in the year 2000. Local organizing and grassroots international activism helped to pressure growers into signing the first ever labor agreement between tenants and landlords in 1999. Implementation of the agreement has been problematic due to a number of factors including the structure of ownership in which many tobacco estate owners are government officials, and the power of the tobacco companies has compromised many government leaders.