Intensive tobacco cultivations, a possible public health risk?

The cultivation of tobacco has serious consequences for the environment: it impoverishes the soil by assimilating its nutrients, it involves an intensive use of highly polluting pesticides, it perturbs the ecosystem through deforestation, and it releases nicotine into the environment, which is toxic for humans. Italy is the first producer of raw tobacco in Europe and the Valtiberina area is among the most profitable. The first cultivations can be reconducted to the period around 1400. The objective of this experimental work is to verify the sustainability of tobacco cultivation near other crops using nicotine as an indicator. The nicotine on medicinal and wild plants adjacent to tobacco crops has been analyzed, assessing whether it is present or not and which is the concentration. To measure the nicotine present with ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC), LC/MS (liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry) method was used with LOQ (quantification limit) of 0.005 mg/kg. A total of 300 lots of aromatic herbs were sampled, and nicotine was detected in 82.3% of the samples in 2015 and 62.9% in 2016. Furthermore, in 2015, 121 samples of wild material were analyzed, of which 88.4% showed traces of nicotine. These first results indicate a possible potential threat for the population health. This shows that the tobacco cultivation should not be in close proximity to other plantation destined for nutrition, neither for man and nor animals. The elevated impact of nicotine on the ecosystem has negative consequences not only for the economy but it is also a potential public health threat.