Tobacco's children: Brazil bests the United States on dangerous conditions in the fields.

• Author: Wurth, Margaret

On a warm January afternoon in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Sandra, a forty-year-old tobacco farmer, dragged a lawn chair to a clearing in her front yard and motioned for me to sit. She was round-faced, with wispy blonde hair pulled into a messy ponytail, her skin creased from years of working in the sun.

"We've been growing tobacco since we were twelve or thirteen," she said, as her husband sat beside her. "Our parents planted tobacco."

I was two days into a month-long trip to investigate child labor in tobacco farming in Brazil, which in 2008 banned all work on the crop by children under eighteen. I had spent two years researching the issue in the United States, where children can legally be hired to work on tobacco farms at age twelve.

Both countries are among the top five global tobacco producers--Brazil is number two and the United States is number four. But the United States has no restrictions on children working in tobacco farming, despite known dangers including nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure, heat illness, and injuries. I was curious to see how Brazil's ban was working.

Sandra--whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, as with others quoted in this article--plants a few hectares of tobacco each year and sells it to a multinational company that supplies tobacco leaf to the world's largest cigarette manufacturers. She and her husband do most of the work on the farm themselves. They have two children: a daughter in her midtwenties who moved away from home to go to college in a nearby city, and a fourteen-year-old son, Matteo, a tall boy with a square jaw and braces.

"Our daughter, when she lived here, she helped," Sandra told me. "She did everything, from the harvest to planting. She started helping when she was about fourteen." But Matteo claimed he does not do much work on the farm. "I help a little bit, but mostly I stay on the Internet," he said, smiling.

I was skeptical. I understood that farmers would be reluctant to talk about child labor with a foreigner who had arrived at their door unannounced, speaking through an interpreter. After what I'd seen in my research in the United States, I had a hard time believing that the strong, athletic boy slumped in a chair across from me sat at home on the computer while his parents worked long hours in the fields.

But the family insisted it was mindful of the new law. Sandra warned of penalties if their son was caught working, though she wasn't sure what the penalties would be. "They can take you to court," she said. "The company says there's no way children can work in tobacco farming." Sandra and her husband hire a few adult workers to help on the farm during the harvest.

I learned that Matteo, who attends the local high school and hopes to study microelectronics, does help on the farm in the summer, but not nearly as much as his older sister did. He takes water to his parents in the fields. He loads piles of brittle, dried tobacco leaves into a wooden crate to form bales that weigh more than 130 pounds. Every so often, he helps his parents harvest tobacco, picking the thick green leaves by hand and holding...