Recently, a debate has started in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad over whether tobacco should be formally recognized as an agricultural crop. The Senate Standing Committee on National Food Security and Research has recommended that tobacco be declared a crop rather than a commodity, and politicians have argued that tobacco is the only agricultural produce in the country denied formal crop status. On the surface, this looks like a question of economic justice for farmers. But it collides with a binding reality: Pakistan is a signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and under Articles 17 and 18 of that treaty, tobacco is not, and cannot be, treated as a regular agricultural crop.

This is not a dispute over the choice of words. The WHO FCTC fundamentally distinguishes tobacco from ordinary crops. Standard crops provide nutrition, food security, and sustainable economic growth. Tobacco is treated as a highly hazardous and exploitative commodity because of its devastating impacts on human health, the environment, and social equity. No other agricultural product is designed to create and sustain a severe chemical addiction and to kill up to half of its regular users when used exactly as intended. That single fact should end the debate. A product with no safe level of use cannot be placed in the same policy category as wheat, rice, sugarcane, or cotton. The treaty’s global mission is to reduce tobacco supply and demand to protect the public right to health, which inherently conflicts with standard agricultural goals of maximizing crop yields and market growth. Declaring tobacco a crop would invert that mission and legitimize a lethal commodity as a normal farming enterprise.

The occupational health risks alone make tobacco exceptional. Harvesting tobacco leaves exposes farmers to Green Tobacco Sickness, a form of acute nicotine poisoning caused by absorbing raw nicotine through the skin. Its symptoms include vomiting, dizziness, and respiratory disorders. Cultivating tobacco also requires an exceptionally high volume of hazardous pesticides and fertilizers, putting growers at elevated risk of long-term chemical toxicity. A 2025 study in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa found that health hazards significantly increased livelihood vulnerability among tobacco farmers, with leaf touch and pesticide exposure directly associated with adverse health outcomes. The study concluded that tobacco production in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa combines income dependence with environmental degradation and occupational health risks, making farmers more vulnerable, not less. If tobacco is declared a crop, these hazards become an accepted feature of agricultural policy. That is morally indefensible and scientifically untenable.

Tobacco is equally destructive to the environment. Curing tobacco leaves requires burning massive amounts of wood, which drives catastrophic local deforestation in tobacco-growing regions. Tobacco is an aggressive monocrop that rapidly saps the soil of essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, rendering agricultural land less fertile for future food production. The same Khyber Pakhtunkhwa study identified deforestation, pesticide use, and fertilizer use as the primary causes of ecological deterioration associated with tobacco farming, with ecological impacts significantly increasing livelihood vulnerability. Under Article 18 of the WHO FCTC, Pakistan is obligated to protect the environment and the health of persons in relation to tobacco cultivation. Recognizing tobacco as a crop would directly contradict that obligation and accelerate environmental damage in a country already grappling with climate vulnerability.

The economic argument for crop status is equally flawed. Advocates say recognition would protect farmers from exploitation. But tobacco farming is itself a system of exploitation. Transnational tobacco leaf-buying companies often lock smallholder farmers into highly restrictive contracts. These systems shift the financial risks of weather and crop failure entirely onto the farmers, trapping entire households in a pervasive cycle of debt. Because tobacco farming is highly labor-intensive, families often rely on unpaid child labor or low-paid bonded labor to keep up with production demands, directly undermining children’s access to education. The current procurement system, as highlighted during the political debate, leaves farmers vulnerable to middlemen, arbitrary grading, and unsold produce. Declaring tobacco a crop would not fix these structural problems. It would legitimize them. It would give tobacco companies a more respectable policy cover while farmers remain trapped in the same unequal relationship.

The WHO FCTC mandate is clear. Articles 17 and 18 obligate participating countries to actively discourage tobacco farming by promoting economically sustainable alternative livelihoods, such as shifting land toward nutritious food crops, and implementing strict environmental and health protections for workers along the production chain. The treaty explicitly frames tobacco as distinct from regular agricultural crops precisely because of its inherent lethality, occupational hazards, environmental destruction, and entrapment of farmers in poverty. Pakistan’s participation in the WHO FCTC’s study group on alternative crops further underscores its commitment to transitioning farmers away from tobacco, not towards its formal recognition as a crop.

The debate in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad must be reframed. The question is not whether tobacco farmers deserve economic justice. Yes! they do. The question is whether declaring tobacco a crop is the right mechanism to achieve it. It is not. The path forward lies in aggressive implementation of Article 17: providing farmers with viable alternative livelihoods, supporting the transition to nutritious food crops, and ensuring that tobacco-growing communities receive the investment and policy support they need to escape the cycle of exploitation. Declaring tobacco a crop would not protect farmers; it would protect the tobacco industry. Pakistan must honor its WHO FCTC commitments, not undermine them. If policymakers genuinely want to help farmers, they should fight for alternative crops, fair transition financing, and enforceable protections not for a label that the country’s international obligations expressly forbid.

Pakistan signed and ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2004. It is not a voluntary guideline or an aspirational statement; it is a legally binding treaty, now joined by 183 Parties covering more than 90 percent of the world’s population. Under it, tobacco has never been treated as an ordinary crop, and for good reason. Wheat, cotton, and sugarcane don’t kill half their long-term users. Tobacco does. In Pakistan alone, it is blamed for roughly 164,000 deaths and PKR 1,800 billion, about $6.6 billion, in economic losses every single year, figures the government’s own health ministry has publicly cited. Declaring tobacco a “regular crop” doesn’t erase that calculus, it just changes how the state talks about it.

Authors are tobacco control advocates working in Islamabad