North Carolina Now; Episode from 1999-03-22

It's Monday, March 22nd tonight. I think it's going to be a trickle-down thing that's going to take a couple of three years before the general public really feels what we're feeling now. Helping growers to find alternatives to tobacco farming in North Carolina now. Good evening, I'm Rita Mitre. Welcome to the start of another week here at North Carolina now. We offer an abbreviated program this evening so we can devote more time to festival 99 our annual fundraiser. On tonight's edition of North Carolina now, we'll hear from a Duke geneticist who will bring us up to date on some of the latest advancements in cancer research. But first, as Spring gets underway here in North Carolina, we focus on farmers and the planting they'll be doing or won't be doing this growing season.

Quote reductions and a troubling mark and have greatly cut production requirements for this tobacco season. And by all accounts, the future for U.S. tobacco growers is far less stable than it once was. How will farmers who have relied on tobacco for their livelihoods survive? Tonight, Sonja Williams looks at a program that's already working to help tobacco growers make adjustments. For Greg Smith, tobacco farming isn't just a way of life, but a family tradition. I was raised on the back of farm. My father is still, he's a lot hotter and we tend his tobacco and, of course, with other landlords also, but he did it and also my grandfather did it. But doing it these days is a lot tougher financially. We started out with around 70, 75 acres and with some of the farm sales, people bind up a lot. And also with the quota cuts we've had around 30% in the last two years, that's just like us.

Someone having a 30% salary decrease. After you get a quota cuts like we've had, I was basically thinking, okay, you know, it's me and my brother is one of us going to go to the city and get a job or we're going to start another small business. You know, exactly what are we going to do to supplement what we have already become accustomed to. And not only that, we had structured our payments on most of our equipment. And then with a 30% loss, you're putting a situation where you've got to find other income. That's where the Rule Advancement Foundation International or Rafi stepped in. It's a nonprofit organization in Pittsburgh that helps Smith open the gate to a new way of life. They got me to thinking areas that I was already involved in. How could stuff that we already knew about and we were already doing benefit us other than just as a hobby. I plan on training horses for people. Maybe somebody's got a horse with just a small problem,

such as, you know, people that don't have time, it's got a job. It wants a horse to be perfect on Saturday afternoon. That horse probably needs working two, three days a week. And we feel like not having as much tobacco as we have, we'll have time to help these people. With Rafi's Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund, Smith received a grant to help build his horse barn and to get his horse business started. Jerry Cohn, a field coordinator with the program, helped Smith realize that because of the changing market, Tobacco could no longer be his sole source of income. And Cohn links Smith with others in the equine business. So I'm really impressed with how many different marketing options he sees around horses between boarding and training and giving lessons and breaking horses. He's really also the hay market. You know, it's really given him an opportunity not to look at a, at a wide variety of sort of offshoot enterprises connected with horses. But Smith is just one of the thousands of tobacco growers throughout North Carolina who are looking for other ways to earn money.

That's why the program is tailored to help meet each individual farmer's needs, their abilities, and their interests. When we work directly on the farm with farmers, we're looking at what's very unique in that farm and that locality and with that farmer's operation. But we also really try to get farmers and other community members to work together as groups to solve their problems. It's a call share. They provide some of the sweat equity or other funds up front to further develop and on farm enterprise. And we provide part of the support for that. And so it both helps them further think out a plan for usually an existing enterprise, how they can use the existing production knowledge. They may have existing facilities, the land, their skills and farming to increase income or add value to a product they're already growing. Betty Bailey, executive director of Raffi, says about 95% of tobacco farmers already grow other products. And Raffi's job is to help them make these commodities grow to be as profitable as tobacco once was.

Many tobacco farmers are already involved with diversification in soybean, but that commodity price tends to be low. And so one farmer we have has found a niche market for organic soybean for the Japanese market, which has been very successful. In the community, we have two types of Acacia grants, a producer grant and a community grant. And in the community grants, we try to provide support for a community idea, usually at seed money, which then attracts other support. For example, in Columbus County, where we're supporting a new farmer's market, other agencies and institutions, town government, and all now have signed on to that project because it was kind of got seed money to start off. The grants can range from up to $10,000 for individual farmers to 30,000 for communities. And now that lawmakers have approved the proposal for a foundation to manage half of the state's $4.6 billion tobacco settlement, officials at Raffi's say their tobacco community's reinvestment fund

could be a model for how the foundation could help farmers and their communities. I think it's going to be very important how the board is appointed, how open the process is, how directly, particularly with the foundation, how directly the funds get to where they're needed, how clear it is, how things are done, and how well-represented the key interest in this settlement feel like they are. Right now, many tobacco farmers are discouraged by the agreement lawmakers reached, and most feel they'll never see their share of the settlement money. It's hard to express how important it is. It's the most important thing to every farmer in eastern North Carolina that does tend to biker. I don't think the general public realizes as of yet, but when we get a 30% cut in the allotment, we get a 30% income decrease. Therefore, we buy 30% less insurance, 30% less tires, 30% less of batteries, plow points, I don't know.

I think it's going to be a trickle-down thing that's going to take a couple of three years before the general public really feels what we're feeling now. What are you feeling? Crunched. Real crunched. So we're trying to find a way to the supplement income that we need to survive out here. And thanks to organizations like Rafi, at least some of the tobacco farmers in eastern North Carolina are doing just that. Currently, the reinvestment fund is available only in seven counties for more information on this and other phone programs. You can contact the Rural Advancement Foundation International at 919-542-1396. Well, coming up on the program, a discussion on some promising research into unlocking the secrets of cancer development and humans. But before we get to that, let's head over to Mitchell Lewis at the North Carolina News Desk for a summary of today's statewide headlines. Hello, Mitch.

Hello, Marita. Good evening, everyone. State officials are being asked to start now in addressing the needs of tobacco-dependent communities. Leaders of civic and non-profit organizations around the state say decisions on what to do with tobacco settlement money need to start well in advance of receipt of the funds. Attorney General Mike Easley agrees and says now is the time to start meeting with farmers and farm communities to find out what the needs are. The first installment of the state's tobacco settlement payments is expected to be deposited around June 2000. State lawmakers say a special legislative body may need to be created to handle campaign finance reform. Senate President Pro Tem Mark Bass Knight says his chamber has been largely unsuccessful in getting substantive reform measures pushed through both houses. Leaders of both the State House and Senate have met with Governor Hunt over the idea of joining of creating a joint committee, but nothing is said to be finalized. House leaders say the first order of business is to pass legislation to clarify the state ban on corporate contributions

and the definition of a political action committee. Local welfare agencies are under pressure to spend money at levels equal to previous years or risk losing funds in the future. Maintenance of the spending level is written into state law. A state official says the requirement is not to promote reckless spending but to encourage county welfare agencies to develop new ways to get people off welfare. Some county social service directors say they should be allowed to save the unused funds or find other uses for the money. Officials with more than half of North Carolina's 100 counties are reporting some difficulty in spending all their welfare funds. A bill currently under consideration in the General Assembly is seeking to establish toll booths at the northernmost and southernmost state line crossings in North Carolina. The proposal would set up tolls along Interstate 95 near the Virginia and South Carolina borders. A similar bill failed in 1997 but more lawmakers are said to be looking favorably on the idea. Revenue from the proposed tolls would be used to Whiten I-95.

State Senator Betsy Cochrane is considering a bid for Lieutenant Governor in 2000. Cochrane says it's a high possibility that she'll seek the number two executive state government post. The Davey County Republican is serving her sixth term in the state Senate. Before then she served four terms as a member of the State House of Representatives. Cochrane is the second Senator to announce interest in the Lieutenant Governor's ship. Democratic Senator Beverly Perdue has already announced she will run for the position. And now for a look at tomorrow's weather, highs in the mountains will range from the lower 50s to lower 60s. The rest of the state will see highs in the lower to mid 60s. Partly sunny skies are in the forecast for most areas for Tuesday. In business news, Carolina Power and Light will spend $400 million on new gas-fired power plants in Richmond and Rowan counties. The Raleigh-Based Utility has filed an application with the state Utilities Commission to build the plants. After getting approval from the two North Carolina counties, construction on the plants is scheduled to begin in December. CP&L, which serves 1.2 million customers in North and South Carolina,

expects to file applications for additional plants in the coming months. Corning Incorporated has begun hiring the first of several hundred workers it expects to employ at its new optical fiber plant in Cabarras County. The first group of workers will help with setup and training in advance of starting production at the $300 million plant in Midland. The Corning Plant will produce the glass fiber used in high speed communications cable. A spokeswoman for New York-based Corning Sass, all new workers should be hired by the middle of next year. North Carolina's unemployment rate rose slightly in February, according to the Employment Security Commission. The increase measures one-tenth of one percent, and puts the state's jobless rate at 3.1 percent. The state rate is still well below the national average of 4.4 percent. A spokesman for the Employment Security Commission says almost 76,000 more people are now working in the state than a year ago. And now for a look at what happened on Wall Street today. The Corning Plant will be the first to start production at the $300 million plant in Midland.

The Corning Plant will be the first to start production at the $300 million plant in Midland. For years, researchers have been looking for the missing pieces in the puzzle to how cells transform into cancer-causing genes. A better understanding of the process could help scientists develop more effective treatments. Recently, Barclay Todd sat down to talk with a geneticist at Duke University Medical Center, who has just completed experiments on gene interaction and cancer. To learn more about this new and exciting cancer research, Duke University Professor Janeticis, Dr. Joseph Nevis joins us now. Dr. Nevis, welcome to the program.

Thank you very much. Let me start off by asking to tell us a little bit more about your research into genes and how they come together and interact to form cancer-causing genes. Well, it's the process of understanding how normal cells grow, what regulates the proliferation of normal cells, what controls abnormal cell proliferation, and what mechanisms then are disrupted and lost when a cancer cell develops. And so much of this is a circuitry that exists within cells that receives normal signals from the outside that tell the cell when to grow and when not to grow. And those signals are transmitted from the cell surface into the cell, providing cues for the cell to grow, sometimes for the cell to die. And when a cancer cell develops, those normal circuits are disrupted. And as a result of that, cells grow when they shouldn't grow, they don't die when they should die. And it's an understanding of those circuits and those pathways that's really

the general question that was being addressed. Now isolating and understanding this relationship, what will this mean for possible cancer treatments? Well, this kind of work that we were involved in does not lead directly to a therapeutic target to a drug. But what it does is it provides important and essential information that will soon, not a terribly long time, but soon. And the process is rapidly accelerating will lead to a therapeutics. The whole concept is that as you know more and more about what the normal events are and what goes wrong in a cancer cell, you can much better develop specific targets that will interfere with the cancer events. Much of cancer therapeutics, as we know them today, are drugs that are quite non-specific. They have a slightly better effect on cancer cells than on normal cells, but not much. And that's why chemotherapy, for instance, is a very

nasty business. It's toxic and it's toxic because it interferes with a lot of normal cells. And the drugs that do this have that effect because they can't readily or easily distinguish between a cancer cell and a normal cell. So much of the goal of cancer research and much of the work that we do is directed at understanding in very specific terms what are the alterations that occur in a cancer cell such that then you can begin to devise specific targets that would interfere much more specifically, much more exquisitely specific than the drugs we have now. Foreign viewers, can you kind of tell us about your study on how this fits in that puzzle as scientists work towards understanding cancer more and of course working towards a cure? Oftentimes these events in a cancer cell are described with an analogy to an accelerator and a break in a car. Cells grow because they receive a stimulus that's much like pushing down on the accelerator of a

car and they stop growing, they're controlled because the break is applied. And there are genes in the cell that do almost exactly that, that accelerate cell growth or that stop cell growth and break cell growth. What happens in a cancer cell is that those genes are altered such that it's as if the accelerator is stuck or the break is defective. And so now the cell in this case continues to grow when it shouldn't grow. Part of the process that was defined in the work that we recently carried out would be the similar to adding power to the accelerator. That is you just barely touch it and then additional power comes in to make it go faster. The interactions that we saw related to the interactions of two genes that accelerate the process and make it go faster. So what's happening in a cancer cell is that that's now deregulated, it's just occurring without any

normal stimulus. And if we can devise then drugs or approaches to interfere with that process by knowing precisely what are the molecular events that have been changed, we have a much better chance and opportunity to come up with a specific intervention. One particular example I could provide is that takes advantage of this, almost this exact information, is a therapeutic that's been developed recently that involves not a drug, but a virus, a common cold virus, that does the much the same thing in the cell as turning on the accelerator and turning off the brake to facilitate growth of the virus. It affects the same genes that are altered in cancer cells and scientists in a pharmaceutical company have engineered a virus such that it will only grow in tumor cells in which the brake has been lost and as a result it kills the cells just because of the fact it's a virus and just like it causes a cold symptom normally in people.

When it grows in the tumor it kills the tumor and it does so because it's providing part of the function that's missing now in that tumor cell. So that's the kind of therapeutic that shows significant promise of treating tumors. It's not a drug in a classical sense in this case it's a virus but it's acting like a drug. It seems a very intricate study and a lot of hopeful signs as we move forward. I know you said your research will be continuing and we hope that when you have more information to share you'll come back with now and come back to North Carolina now and share it with us. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was my pleasure. And that's our program for tonight. Please join us tomorrow at 734. Another edition of North Carolina now. Mitchell Lewis will look at how a group of African-American entrepreneurs and pit county are working to create a minority-owned bank. Now let's head back to festival 99. We're in the last week of our annual fundraiser. Good night everyone.