LARRY SAMPSON sucks in some nicotine, contemplates the whiff of death hanging over his tobacco crop and wills Congress to spare it from extinction.

“I’m a tobacco farmer this year,” he says in a slow, southern drawl, eyeing perfect rows of flue-cured tobacco, the king of the crop. “You have to take it a year at a time.”

Mr Sampson, a burly Lumbee Indian who jokes about how Native Americans like him were puffing pipes long before Sir Walter Raleigh, smokes without fear and lives off tobacco as his family has for generations.

But trouble is afoot in the tobacco fields of America, now facing perhaps the greatest challenge since the industry’s birth in the 1600s.

The symbol of the farmers’ distress is Dwight Watson, a 50-year-old North Carolina farmer who was jailed after he drove his tractor into a pond near the White House pretending it was packed with explosives. His was a desperate attempt to protest against government tobacco policies. He caused traffic jams for two days in March. His fellow farmers speak with disdain of city dwellers and their smoke-free malls.

They reserve particular contempt for New York, where 19th-century bohemians once drove the cigarette cult but where a ban on smoking in bars is now enforced.

Mr Sampson, at 50, says he faces a retirement without luxury after a lifetime of hard work.

In nearby Fairmont, the only evidence of the town’s heyday lies in a small barn painted baby blue. There the names of the 37 warehouses once packed with farmers on auction day hang on a museum wall.

Local residents speak nostalgically of the Fifties and Sixties. Lib Haywood, 67, the museum’s curator, said: “Tobacco trucks would be lined all along the streets. Business was good.”

On the wall, an early form of industry denial recalls that people once thought tomatoes were poisonous. Mrs Haywood forgets when Americans learnt that cigarettes were dangerous but thinks it was five years ago.

The farmers say they will go bust unless Congress approves compensation, funded by tobacco companies, which has cross-party support among tobacco state representatives but could be difficult to pass, given suspicions of the industry.

“The politicians in Washington don’t know the kind of stress we are under,” says Mel Ray, driving around his tobacco fields that stretch for miles.

Subsidies and a price-support programme made the crop attractive when he took it up in 1986, even though his career choice made his mother cry. Now, cheap imports and counterfeit goods imperil growers in the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, who once dominated the most lucrative, flue-cured global market but who now have only 5 per cent of that market. President Clinton’s campaign against the industry led to a 1998 deal that cost tobacco giants nearly $206billion (£128billion) in compensation for smoking-related costs and sent cigarette prices through the roof. In North Carolina, the number of farms plummeted from 150,000 in 1954 to 12,100 in 1997. Freak hurricanes and two years of drought piled on the agony.

The bailout, or “buyout” as it is known, would pay farmers $4 per pound of tobacco they are allowed to grow under a government quota that was introduced to support prices after the Great Depression.

Owners of that same quota, some of them farmers but many of them non-farming landowners, would get $8 a pound. Removing the quota system would allow prices to drop, removing a millstone which has gradually eroded their ability to compete with lower-priced tobacco from Brazil and Zimbabwe. Since 1998, US consumption has fallen 7.5 per cent and the amount of quota the farmers may grow has shrunk by half.

So the farmers have trawled the corridors of Congress to lobby for the buyout. Philip Morris backs them, hoping the deal will bring in costly regulation that will crush smaller competitors.

The prominent North Carolina senators Elizabeth Dole, a Republican, and John Edwards, a Democrat candidate for President, also back them. Even some health groups, aware of the industry’s influence on Capitol Hill, do not object. Others suspect that there will be hidden costs to the taxpayer in a deal which is predicted to cost up to $16billion.

But John Banzhaf, the executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, says the farmers have had plenty of time to get out of tobacco since the US Surgeon General imposed warnings on cigarettes in 1964 and compares their stance to the South’s reluctance to end slavery. “They are killing almost 500,000 Americans and costing us $140billion a year.”

But the farmers feel misunderstood. “Smoking is legal, it’s freedom of choice and I think it’s time for people to get off the companies’ backs, to get off our backs and let us do what we do,” Mr Ray says.

In his office, beside a slogan reading “Thank you for holding your breath while I smoke”, he pulls out a handful of seeds coated with a pink covering to distinguish them from the earth. “When you can take a seed that you can barely see and in half a year produce a crop that will potentially make $4,500 to $5,000 an acre, it’s pretty incredible.”

He treats his crop like his children, he says.The leaves are soft like wool. He opens the door on a cured batch of leaves and a wall of cigarette scent. As he lights up, he admits: “I’m not convinced 100 per cent that tobacco causes cancer.” But his way of life is precarious. “Sometimes I wonder what the heck I’m doing. I could work a lot less and have a lot more fun. Here you’re an SOB if you’re a farmer, especially a tobacco farmer.”

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