Duncan Graham, Jakarta – Lawmakers pushing for tighter controls on Indonesia's rampant tobacco habit are facing heavy-duty hostility from the multibillion-dollar industry's powerful lobby groups, which to date have ensured that the country is the only one in Southeast Asia that has not signed or ratified the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
The House of Representatives is drafting a bill to ban advertising and sponsorship by tobacco companies, ratchet up taxes on smokes, and boost medical research on the health impacts of smoking, points based on the WHO's convention. There may be some fiddling at the edges of the law, but total success seems highly unlikely.
The proposed law is supported by 220 legislators, but they're confronting awesome opposition, including government departments that fear the loss of jobs, taxes and investment. Indonesia has the region's largest tobacco industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people and generating billions of dollars' worth of revenues.
Supporters of the industry claim that it employs as many as 5 million people, a crucial source of jobs in a country where unemployment remains stubbornly high. Independent researchers notably have not scientifically dissected that manpower figure and statistics in Indonesia are always rubbery, with those from government agencies particularly elastic. Even former president Megawati Sukarnoputri once publicly warned voters against relying on official figures.
House of Representatives member Hakim Sarimuda Pohan, who chairs the committee drafting the tobacco-control bill, has been quoted as saying new laws are needed specifically to stop children from smoking. He claimed that in the past five years there has been a 900% increase in children under 10 years old getting hooked, an extraordinary claim that has been supported by the National Commission for Child Protection. Its research shows that more than 90% of young teens are affected by late-evening smoke ads carried on mainstream television.
Professor Mike Daube, a 34-year international veteran of global anti-smoking campaigns and onetime chief executive officer of Australia's Cancer Council, has predicted a heavy rear-guard campaign by the Indonesian tobacco industry aimed at protecting its business interests as the bill approaches parliamentary debate.
"The companies [in Indonesia] will be claiming a loss of freedom of speech and that sporting events and music shows will vanish without their sponsorship," Daube said. "Our experience shows that's just not true. They'll use all the second-hand arguments that have failed elsewhere in the world."
Indonesia has some of the slackest controls on smoking in the region. Health activists are almost silent, having been crippled by punitive legal actions. They have unsuccessfully argued that tobacco-company sponsorship of television programs – including newscasts – amounted to advertising in disguise.
Tobacco-related revenues are crucial to the national finances, ranking as the third-largest revenue source. On March 1, taxes on cigarettes in Indonesia were raised by 7%, and another hike of Rp7 a stick, or less than 1 US cent per unit, is scheduled for July. Total tobacco-related tax income is expected to exceed Rp42 trillion ($4.6 billion) this year.
Yet by world standards, Indonesian cigarettes are still ridiculously cheap and taxes comparatively low. Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore impose tobacco taxes starting at 70% and rising. The top Indonesian rate is 40% – then drops according to a complex formula based on company output and manufacturing systems. Even after this year's increases, smokes in Indonesia retail for about one-fifth of the price of those sold in nearby countries. Smoky streetscapes
The streetscapes of Indonesian cities are dominated by huge billboards promoting cigarettes. Current laws already prohibit scenes showing cigarettes or people smoking – but this has only caused ad agencies to be more creative.
One popular ad promotes a cigarette brand that allegedly tastes like cappuccino by portraying a stack of coffee cups in the shape of a cigarette. Most link sexual prowess, outdoor adventure and male bonding to the ingestion of nicotine. "Real men smoke (brand name)" has proved to be one of the more successful slogans.
Meanwhile, recently introduced restrictions on smoking in public places are widely ignored, with offenders logically arguing that trucks, cars and government-run buses belching black smoke should be targeted first. Compulsory health warnings on cigarette packs and ads are minuscule and wordy – unlike the gruesome portraits of the bodily harm smoking can cause that are now mandatory on packs sold in nearby Thailand.
Although sales to minors in Indonesia are prohibited, the law is infrequently policed. The sight of schoolboys brazenly inhaling in the street is a common sight. There's even an open trade in tax-free smokes, often hand-made from tobacco smuggled out of factories, and on display at roadside eateries across East Java. These sell for about Rp3,000 (30 cents) for a packet of 12 – less than half the price of legal brands. For the poor, cigarettes can be bought one at a time – a practice politician Hakim and his backers also want to ban.
According to the latest research funded by the WHO and the American Cancer Society, almost 70% of Indonesian men smoke. The good news is that only 3% of women light up, largely because the culture links smoking to prostitution. (Night streetwalkers can often be sighted in the shadows by the glow of their smokes.) That hasn't stopped the industry targeting women, even to the extent of spuriously linking smoking to orgasms, when in fact it can damage reproductive organs.
In 1969, the average cigarette consumption per Indonesian smoker was 469 sticks a year. That figure has now almost tripled, according to recent studies. And the death rate from smoking-related diseases is reportedly close to 50%, with cancer and heart attacks as the main killers.
Not surprisingly, Indonesia's tobacco companies don't like being portrayed as purveyors of poisons and killers of citizens. So they have tried to boost their image through socially responsible campaigns, including a recent drive to clean up the environment. For instance, Sampurna, the country's second-largest cigarette manufacturer, now owned by US tobacco giant Philip Morris, pays for signs urging people not to litter. Another ploy is to fund educational institutions and scholarships. These are illegal in many countries when the company uses its own name or the name of a product.
Sampurna has also started to seduce journalists with media awards equal in most cases to six months' salary for the average reporter. It has already ensnared the environmental lobby with a green brand name and grants to conservationists.
One particularly hypocritical advertisement shows a tobacco company sponsoring an anti-narcotics campaign – while many health authorities say nicotine is a gateway drug to harder stuff.
Daube said tactics used in the past by the tobacco lobby included recruiting financial journalists to run stories claiming controls would trigger a widespread business collapse, and "flat-Earth doctors" denying medical evidence of the health dangers. He said the arguments now circulating in political circles that controls would cause tobacco farmers to go bankrupt are patently false, noting that in Australia growers shifted to other, often more profitable, crops.
"Smoking kills about half the known users. It's responsible for about 10% of global deaths," said Daube. "The industry will claim it has a right to advertise because there's no scientific proof that advertising encourages people to start smoking and that the product is legal. Newspapers and magazines will protest that they'll lose revenue. Sports administrators will say games will suffer. We've heard all these claims before and seen them refuted."
In Australia, Thailand and other countries in the region, the involvement of medical and public-health professionals in anti-smoking campaigns has been critical to raising public awareness about the habit's dangers and in effecting declining smoking rates. In Indonesia, up to 30% of doctors are smokers, and some in the industry argue that there's no better promotion for cigarette consumption than an addicted doctor.
[Duncan Graham is an Indonesia-based journalist.]