ABSTRACT
In Malawi, Philip Morris and other tobacco companies purchase tobacco from local subsidiaries of US-based leaf merchants. Two of these, Universal and Alliance One International, buy virtually all of Malawi's crop. Leaf merchants routinely engage in price-fixing on local auction floors where tobacco is sold to global buyers. Over 95 percent of Malawi's crop is exported. No manufactured cigarettes are produced in Malawi. Philip Morris and its colleagues profit from that price-fixing, and from tobacco whose low prices both derive from, and perpetuate, poverty, labor exploitation and deforestation in Malawi. But growing public awareness that tobacco and tobacco-related products kill 5,000,000 people each year has damaged the reputations both of Philip Morris and of the world's other transnational tobacco companies.
