"Of course many factors … contributed to the reduced output in the industry," Dr. Walden says. "Domestic smoking per capita in total has been falling for really 40 years, so that final market has shrunk.

"North Carolina tobacco used to be by far the highest quality tobacco in the world. Now other countries are matching it and are able to produce their leaf for lower cost," he adds. "So the cigarette production that we do do here in the U.S. increasingly is using foreign-made tobacco.

"If there are any growing markets for tobacco products they are going to be in foreign countries and so for this reason we expect to see both tobacco production at the farm level as well as the cigarette production going increasingly to foreign countries.

"So I think we certainly have had a long and important history with tobacco in North Carolina," Walden concludes, "but I think it’s permanently going to be a much smaller part of our future."