SBS World News Radio: After delegates from 180 countries met in India to discuss a global anti-tobacco treaty, SBS travelled to the southern Indian state of Karnataka to see how tobacco farmers feel about it.
Dawn has just broken in southern India, and hundreds of tobacco farmers are on their way to auction.
Their bales of tobacco are transported on small trucks, Massey Ferguson tractors and carts pulled by bullocks.
In southern India, this is big business for Big Tobacco.
Half of the product available at the Hunsur market near the city of Mysore will be bought by the cigarette maker ITC, part-owned by British American Tobacco.
Local farmers like this man, Shivabasappa, earn three dollars a kilogram for high-grade leaves.
"Tobacco has made me rich. I am making a lot of money. I don't want to stop, so I will continue to farm it."
Shivabasappa says tobacco farming is a respectable job, lucrative enough to get a bank loan and attract a wife.
But on the health impacts of tobacco, the southern Indian farmer might be considered misinformed, or in denial.
"Tobacco and cigarettes don't cause cancer. People who don't smoke get cancer. It comes from alcohol and other things.
Why should tobacco be banned?"
India is the world's third-largest producer of tobacco, behind China and Brazil.
Millions of Indians rely on the industry for their livelihoods, and that is unlikely to change unless they are provided with alternative sources of employment.
Earlier this year, India's government approved a crop-diversification program across 10 states.
It has also followed Australia's lead on plain packaging.
And just as Big Tobacco fought those laws in Australia, it is challenging them in India, too, with dozens of legal battles currently before the courts.
India's health minister, JP Nadda, has called for an international coalition of the willing.
"We cannot do this alone. Along with national will and resources, we also need the strength of international collaboration to mitigate the rising burden of the health, social and economic costs of tobacco."
Smoking-related diseases kill an estimated 6 million people every year, 1 million of them in India.
Mysore resident Mohammad Arshad says he has been smoking for 14 years, almost half of his life.
Each night when he goes to bed, he makes himself a promise.
"I just promise myself that, 'Tomorrow, I don't smoke. I shouldn't be smoking tomorrow.' But when I wake up, after I have breakfast, my lungs say I need one cigarette."
Shivabasappa, the tobacco farmer, suffers no such anxiety.
He says he will continue to grow his crop and smoke it.
It has given him the money to educate his son, who he hopes will become a doctor.
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