Tobacco town thrives as China struggles to kick the habit

VISITORS mill around a bright red hilltop pagoda in southwestern China, gazing down at a sprawling cigarette factory whose deadly output has put an otherwise unremarkable city on the map.

- AFP

China is home to a third of the world's smokers and tobacco-related diseases are a major cause of death in the country -- a trend likely to worsen as its population rapidly ages.

Beijing hopes to dramatically reduce that by the end of the decade, but even the government machine is struggling to achieve that as it clashes with a powerful state tobacco monopoly and local economies reliant on the crop.

That contradiction smoulders in Yuxi, Yunnan province, whose nascent tourism businesses and local farmers thrive on its history of cigarette production.

A mostly agricultural area where incomes lag behind the national average, the city has firmly hitched its fortunes to tobacco, which accounted for almost a third of its gross domestic product in the first quarter of last year, according to official figures.

That income helps "pay for our children's schooling or to build a house", farmer Li told AFP as her husband ploughed furrows into a hilltop field.