Caring for Toxic Tobacco Cultivation Across Caribbean and Andean Colombia

This essay on care and toxicity in Colombia’s tobacco economies is the eighth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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The industrial tobacco life cycle is insidiously toxic. From production to consumption, industrial tobacco pollutes everything that it touches. Air, soils, and water all become part of a vast contamination. Globally, tobacco production consumes twenty-two billion tons of water and drives five percent of global deforestation. Each cigarette emits approximately fourteen grams of carbon dioxide across the supply chain, and billions of cigarette butts flow into rivers and oceans, leaking toxic chemicals and microplastics into ecosystems. Cigarette butts are one of the most pervasive sources of water pollution globally.  

Industrial tobacco agriculture has established a large commodity chain dominated by corporations who have turned rural production regions into sacrifice zones. Deforestation and land degradation are part of the ecological fallout of this system, with nearly 200,000 hectares of forest and woodlands cleared each year for tobacco farming and flue curing. These environmental transformations are inseparable from broader social harms.

In Colombia, these toxic relations are embedded with campesinas, who have played a vital role in supporting large estate and smallholder tobacco economies in the Caribbean and the Andean regions. (We understand campesina/o/x as a relational, political, and historically situated category shaped by rural experiences and struggles over labor, land, and ecologies. Because there is no direct equivalent in English, we retain the Spanish term throughout this essay while using different gendered forms that reflect the diverse, feminist, and scholarly traditions informing our work.)

Colombian women and children have held, and continue to hold crucial roles in tobacco production—from processing leaves and preparing the ovens to domestic labor, including cooking and cleaning, to support the wellbeing of the community.

This essay emerges from our respective historical and ethnographic work in Colombia’s tobacco regions. We draw on our archival research, oral histories, and collaborative work with rural communities in the Caribbean and the Eastern Andes. Although our research emerged from different regions, communities, and environments, we see remarkable parallels in the centrality and invisibilization of women’s labor in tobacco production and tobacco-producing communities.

Tobacco circulates on internal and external markets, from the low mountain zones in the Caribbean to the dry highlands in the Chicamocha canyon. In both regions, women and children performed all the necessary labor to materially sustain life and ensure the everyday workings of rural economies. In tracing these histories of care, we ask how toxic chemicals became normalized within everyday rural life and what accountability looks like today.

Sustaining Life Within Latifundio Landscapes and Enclosures

The Colombian Caribbean region has one of the most unequal agricultural structures in Latin America. Over the past century, the expansion of cattle ranching estates and various agricultural booms—cotton, bananas, and palm oil—have resulted in significant concentration of land ownership. As more land was co-opted for monoculture and cattle ranching, large estates enclosed campesino communities’ access to water and land, restricting their capacity to subsist. Campesinos were compelled to work on these very estates as seasonal workers or day laborers, or to clear land on the agricultural frontier to cultivate food crops and build their houses on the margins of the latifundio, a historical structure of land tenure that promotes rural inequality and land grabbing from communities and environments, leaving campesinos with little access to water or food.

Throughout the twentieth century, campesinas’ engagement with tobacco represents a paradox. Tobacco cultivation emerged as a way for cattle ranchers and landowners to raise even more income in a landscape of enclosed estates. This tobacco, however, was also a source of income for campesinas. Women could process tobacco leaves at home while caring for their children and managing household chores.

Campesinas and children sustained life amidst enclosure. They worked on the estates as domestic servants—cooking, cleaning, and otherwise tending to workers—to ensure daily rural production, while also caring for their families and extended communities.

Tobacco processing was a craft deeply integrated into the domestic space and the daily reproductive activities that campesinas and children carried out in their everyday routines. Archival documents collected by the Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda reveal that tobacco processing was learned at home and performed by campesinas and children. In one of their interviews, Fals Borda records how:

Women who worked in the tobacco industry as wage earners were typically responsible for tasks such as sorting, smoothing, and folding tobacco leaves. These skills were often acquired at an early age from their mothers at home. Girls usually sit with their mothers and observe their work until they learn how to differentiate between the quality of tobacco, its thickness, the length of the leaf, and how to handle the needle and introduce it through the middle of the leaf vein from the lower part of the leaf. These are skills that girls started learning and performing from the age of 7 or 8.

The craft of tobacco processing was passed down through generations from mothers to children as embodied knowledge. In her oral history, Delfina, a campesina who worked on cotton and cattle ranching estates in Córdoba and Sucre during the second half of the twentieth century, remembers learning how to process tobacco from her mother at home. Tobacco work earned extra income to support a family with an absent father. All day, Delfina picked cotton on estates and then processed tobacco at home for extra income for her family. The concurrence of cotton picking and tobacco work demonstrates how tobacco fostered agency and provided material conditions to sustain life even as it created scarcity in landscapes of large states and enclosures.

The Industrialization of Care in the Eastern Colombian Andes

In the Eastern Andes, campesinas and their children prepared tobacco seedlings, cooked for tobacco workers, harvested the crop, and maintained domestic and labor spaces where tobacco work unfolded. Here, however, these practices were shaped by the industrial agrochemical regimes—the widespread incorporation of industrial pesticides, fertilizers, and curing substances into tobacco production. These regimes reshaped how campesinxs cared for crops, homes, bodies, and rural environments. In the Andes, these chemicals saturated domestic spaces, transforming sites of enclosure into sites of toxic exposure.

The toxic regime of industrial tobacco in Colombia took shape in the 1920s, as agricultural knowledge and technologies circulated from urban centers into rural areas. Universities, industries, and state institutions funded regional experimental stations to test cultivation and hybridization techniques, as well as methods for processing and caring for the plant, to maximize large leaves with high sugar and nicotine content. These forms of knowledge were introduced into rural communities by technicians, manuals, and training programs. This new infrastructure reorganized how tobacco life was tended in fields and homes.  

Cultivation manuals recommended the use of pesticides like lead arsenate, Aldrin, Paris Green (copper acetoarsenite), and DDT. By 1955, the Colombian Tobacco Census recorded that of the 7,478 hectares of black tobacco cultivated in Santander (Eastern Andes), nearly 80 percent of these lands were infected by “pests” or disease. This prompted cultivators to adopt the agrochemicals that the industry provided.

Agrochemicals were part of an unprecedented, infrastructural process of modernization, coordinated by multinational corporations (including Shell, Bayer, Dow Chemical, and Dupont) and Global South networks of expertise. These substances—now recognized as carcinogenic, bioaccumulative, and persistent in soils—left a toxic legacy that continues to damage campesino health and the ecological life of the region. 

Memories of Care Within Toxic Landscapes

Toxicity in Colombian tobacco cultivation was scientifically-guided, embodied, infrastructural, and intimate. In the Eastern Andes, campesino communities recall the labor of caring for tobacco crops amid pests, viruses, “plagues,” fungi, and “weeds” as a daily and seasonal practice, one in which they followed the rhythms of the plant and the ecosystem in a constant performance of industrial care.

Campesinxs interviewed in Santander remember the labor of industrial care as guided by technicians during their constant visit to the fields. Campesinxs’ care-work reproduced social life as well as tobacco life. They secured the correct amount of water, prevented weeds from competing for soil nutrients, attended to the presence of budworms, pruned crops carefully to meet the required leaf size and sugar content; and monitored for spots or deformities that signal viruses or fungal infections.

Toxic exposures were deeply gendered, unfolding in the fields and in the intimate spaces of the home. In Villanueva, a town in southern Santander, the Macías family uses highly toxic insecticides like Parathion or Furadan. In the short term, exposure causes dizziness, nausea, sweating, and breathing difficulties. Long-term exposure can lead to chronic neurological problems, memory loss, and nerve damage. Even away from the fields, women encountered chemicals in the everyday labor of washing clothes, preparing food, or maintaining tobacco ovens and caneys (traditional open-air structures used for drying tobacco leaves). Women from the Macías family remember: “We would soak the clothes in water for several days to get rid of the smell […] Then we would wash them on the stone and try not to go too close to the kitchen on washing days so the food wouldn’t get poisoned.”

Since childhood, Mercedes Bermúdez, a campesina from Enciso, in Santander, has cleaned the hot curing ovens used to process bright tobacco leaves, then cooked for her family and the seasonal sharecroppers, constantly moving between tobacco curing infrastructures and wood-fired kitchens. She inhaled hot charcoal smoke and chemical residues from tobacco ovens, and wood smoke from cooking. Now, diagnosed with a chronic lung disease, she depends on oxygen tanks to breathe at night. Mercedes’s sleep apnea is a direct consequence of her labor to sustain life in the tobacco economies.

Chemicals swirl in material and immaterial worlds, refusing to settle, moving across and into bodies, land, and memories. Accountability, then, requires not only tracing the corporation that circulated chemical for capital, but attending to the intimate, gendered labor through which campesinxs have sustained life within toxicity.

Troubling Social Reproduction in Tobacco Worlds and Large Estate Economies  

In the intimate spaces of the home, tobacco-related toxicity was not only an external threat but also a nonconsensual internal condition, woven into the daily care labor by which campesinas sustained their families and communities. To demand accountability is to refuse the invisibilization of suffering: to insist that the chemicals in Mercedes’s lungs are industrial, and that toxic production and reproduction are infrastructural—not her burden alone, but the legacy of corporations who offer rural toxicity as progress.

Demanding accountability for chemicals means recognizing their ongoing agency. It means declaring that the intimate labor of sustaining life cannot be erased from memory. By recognizing the paradoxical relationship between women and tobacco—one that enabled forms of survival even as it reproduces enclosures, scarcity, and toxic legacies, we are troubling social reproduction as a critique and calling for historical accountability.

To remember these histories is not only to document suffering, but also to make campesinxs’ care and labor historically visible. To hold these histories accountable is to recognize the environmental relations through which chemicals moved across bodies, homes, soils, water, and rural communities, binding multinational corporations, agrarian modernization projects, and everyday practices of care into the making of toxic tobacco landscapes. These histories remind us that the struggle over enclosure and toxicity is also a struggle over whose lives, labor, and environments are considered disposable within projects of capitalist modernization.

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Featured Image: A tobacco field in Capitanejo (Santander). Photo by Nicolás Rueda Rey, 2022.

Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research focuses on agrarian change, labor regimes, and environmental histories in rural Colombia, with particular attention to industrial tobacco production and campesino communities in Santander. He is a translator coordinator at Edge Effects and a member of La Mesa Sectorial del Tabaco, a tripartite consultative forum in Colombia bringing together government, industry, and academic actors to coordinate standards for labor competencies, training, and technological development in the tobacco agroindustrial sector. He currently coordinates the Global Tobacco History Network, an academic network of scholars working on the global and imperial history of tobacco that fosters collaboration and exchange across geographically diverse research traditions. His last contribution to Edge Effects was “Cosmo-Visions of Truth After Violence: A Conversation with Abby Reyes and Carolina Sarmiento” (February 2026). Contact.

Margarita Martínez-Osorio is a historian and researcher based in Bogotá, Colombia. A Fulbright scholar with a Ph.D. in Latin American History from Indiana University, she specializes in feminist political ecology, agrarian studies, and gender justice. She currently coordinates the Gender line at Dejusticia, one of Colombia’s leading human rights think tanks, leading advocacy efforts and research on gender inequalities across Colombia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Contact.