Report highlights child labor on US tobacco farms

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  Farm workers make their way across a field shrouded in fog as they hoe weeds from a burley tobacco crop near Warsaw, Ky., in 2008. (Ed Reinke/AP)
• An international rights group is pushing the federal government and the tobacco industry to take further steps to protect children working on U.S. tobacco farms. A report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch claims that children as young as 7 are sometimes working long hours in fields harvesting nicotine- and pesticide-laced tobacco leaves under sometimes hazardous conditions. Most of what the group documented is legal, but it wants cigarette makers to push for safety on farms from which they buy tobacco. Human Rights Watch details findings from interviews with more than 140 children working on farms in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia

By Associated Press