Tobacco poison surrounds child workers

The children pick through mountainous piles of waste tobacco and sweep it up with their bare hands into giant bags in the hope of scraping a living. From behind a veil of dust, they stare back at us with bloodshot eyes. As the wind gathers in a fading dusk, infant siblings strapped to their mothers' backs wail amid swirling, noxious clouds of tobacco. Beyond them, a parched maize plantation stretches into the distance towards the factory buildings of Alliance One, the world's largest tobacco processor and the source of up to 30% of the premium tobacco enjoyed by Britain's 13m smokers. A Sunday Times investigation in the southern African state of Malawi has uncovered an environmental travesty that is being inflicted by the tobacco industry on some of the continent's poorest people.