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Efforts to ban cigarette ads continue  

The National Commission for Child Protection (Komnas PA) said Saturday it would stop its campaign for an end to cigarette promotion.

"The commission will continue its campaign to ban cigarette advertising. We are trying to push the health bill into law before the current House of Representatives members finish their term," said Cahya Shima Dewi, the commission's communication officer.

Cahya said the commission was still demanding that lawmakers impose harsher measures on cigarette usage through the health bill.

"The Komnas is pleading for a picture of the effect cigarettes have on the lungs, like the ones used overseas, be placed on every cigarette pack," she told The Jakarta Post in a telephone interview.

"The bill should ban smoking in public places and tax on tobacco products must be increased as much as possible."

The health bill was passed into law on Monday and contains only two articles on cigarettes.

Article 114 orders those producing or importing cigarettes to include health warnings while Article 115 regulates on smoke-free locations.

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• Cigarette Ads Upheld by Indonesia's Constitutional Court  

A split Constitutional Court on Thursday quashed a petition to ban cigarette advertising on television, rejecting appeals that ads could encourage children to start smoking.

In a five-four decision, the court said the petition filed by two child protection groups and two children was legally baseless.

“Cigarettes are a legal commodity,” Chief Justice Mahfud MD said, reading the court’s ruling. “For that reason, cigarette promotion should also be seen as a legal action.”

The National Commission for Child Protection (Komnas Anak) and the West Java-based Children’s Protection Council had demanded that the court void an article in the 2002 Broadcasting Law that states that commercial ads may be aired by electronic media as long as they didn’t show cigarettes or people smoking. . . .

Judge Arsyad Sanusi said the Constitutional Court would be acting unfairly if it only focused on the negative impacts of cigarettes, while ignoring the views of cigarette producers, tobacco farmers, the advertising industry and other businesses related to cigarette production.

“In 2008, 400,000 people worked directly in the cigarette industry,” he said. “Meanwhile, there are 2.4 million tobacco farmers, 1.5 million clove farmers, 4.8 million [cigarette] sellers and 1 million workers in related industries such as printing and transportation.”

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EDITORIAL: Stopping Tobacco Ads Now Up to the People of Indonesia  

A ban on cigarette advertising is critical if we are to protect our young from this harmful addiction. Each day that we waver on laws regulating and banning cigarette advertising, many more people die from tobacco-related illnesses.

The Constitutional Court has made a grave mistake. Its ruling only hurts our children. Although the court’s rulings are final, anti-tobacco groups must continue to fight against the financial might of cigarette companies. There are still other avenues open, and other laws, such as those governing films and the media.

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Constitutional Court favors Broadcasting Law on cigarette ads  

The Constitutional Court issued a verdict on Thursday in favor of the Broadcasting Law that legalizes cigarette advertisements.

The verdict stipulated that cigarette advertisements would still be legal as long as the cigarette was not banned.

"We reject the request from the plaintiff," Constitutional Court chief Mahfud MD said as quoted by kompas.com

The plaintiff is the Children Protection National Commission

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• BOWRING: US Hypocrisy and Kretek 

Indonesians should turn their attention away from Malaysian theft of their culture to American maltreatment of a rather different national icon – the kretek cigarette.

As of October 1 it will become a criminal offense in the supposedly free United States to sell kretek, the clove-enhanced cigarette dear to most Indonesian smokers and increasingly to foreigners. Indonesia should take this behavior to the World Trade Organisation. The country which in the name of free trade has for decades ensured that its tobacco companies are foisted on the world has the temerity to ban somebody else's exports to the US. . . .

The hypocrisy of the US is stunning. According to a study by Frank J. Chaloupka and Adit Laixuthai for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the US in the 1980s and 1990s used Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to force open the cigarette markets of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand. "Estimates from fixed-effects models indicate that the market share of US cigarettes in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand increased dramatically after the agreements as consumers switched from the brands produced by domestic monopolies to the brands of US cigarette producers," Chaloupka and Laixuthai wrote. "In addition, simulations based on the regression results indicate that per capita cigarette consumption in 1991 in the four affected countries was nearly 10 percent higher than it would have been had the markets remained closed to U.S. cigarettes." . . .

In fact smoking disease patterns suggest that American-style flue-cured, Virginia tobacco with chemical additives which are the most dangerous cigarettes – certainly compared with the air-cured black tobacco ones such as France's traditional Gauloises and Gitanes.

The ban on kretek is discriminatory. One can be sure that if cloves were grown in the US there would be no such ban. As it is, Indonesians might think a reasonable riposte would be to ban all US-brand name colas until the kretek ban is lifted. After all, who knows what noxious substances are in Coca-Cola? The formula is a secret.

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• New council member named suspect in cigarette fraud case 

The Malang customs and excise office (KPPBC) has busted a syndicate that produced and distributed cigarettes bearing improper excise stickers, an official said Thursday.

The syndicate allegedly involved a recently-elected member of the Malang Legislative Council.

Head of the KPPBC's intelligence and execution section, Rudi Hery Kurniawan, said that during a raid held earlier this week the team had arrested four suspects and seized millions of cigarettes.

"The cigarettes were about to be shipped to Sulawesi when we seized them. They were heading to Surabaya's Tanjung Perak Port in two trucks," Rudi said.

The four suspects, Rudi said, were identified only as JM and, who were driving the trucks, S, who allegedly managed the factory and N, who owned the misused excise number.

N, from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), was recently sworn in as a councilor at Malang municipal legislature. He owns the Dollar cigarette factory, which produces the Actor Super and DL Super cigarettes that were seized by the KPPBC.

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Public vehicles a safe haven for smokers: Survey  

The Jakarta administration’s efforts to implement a smoking ban on public transportations since 2005 seems to have gone up in smoke, as a recent survey by the Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) reveals a high percentage of violations.

The survey, in early to mid-July, showed violations in 89 percent of 549 public buses and minivans in the city’s five municipalities.

YLKI’s coordinator Tulus Abadi said Thursday out of 807 violators caught smoking in public vehicles, 348 were drivers, 320 passengers and 139 were drivers’ assistants.

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A look at clove cigarettes 

Also known as kreteks (pronounced "cree-techs") for the crackling sound they make when burned, the cigarettes contain tobacco blended with cloves.

WHERE THEY STARTED: They originated in the 1880s in Indonesia and are a staple of the Indonesian smoking culture &

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• Cigarettes in films must be banned: Commission 

The National Commission for Child Protection said Thursday that politicians had to ban the advertising of cigarette in movies.

"We demand that the House of Representatives insert an article in the bill on films banning cigarette promotions in movies," said Muhammad Joni, the vice chairman of the Commission. The Commission said the bill must forbid cigarette companies from sponsoring the production of films, ban scenes where actors are shown smoking and prevent companies from marketing tobacco brands in the film.

Joni said the current bill, if passed into law, would possess weaker measures on prohibiting cigarette advertising compared to the laws on broadcasting and the press.

"At least in both those laws, companies cannot display or broadcast cigarette products through their advertising," Joni said.

In the bill on films, Joni said, no article regulating the advertisement of cigarettes had been included.

The Commission has sent letters voicing their concerns and recommendations to the House and would try and arrange a meeting with lawmakers, Joni said.

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• 80 million a day: big tobacco's new frontier  

The Marlboro Man is alive and well, adorning bill boards around Indonesia.

David Stanford of the Indonesia Consumers Foundation says "from the tobacco company's perspective Indonesia is a paradise".

It's estimated that more than 80 million Indonesians smoke. Many favour clove cigarettes known as kreteks. They are immensely popular among locals.

In 2005 Philip Morris, the world's biggest tobacco corporation, bought Sampoerna . . .

So proud is Sampoerna of its legacy and history that it's established a tobacco museum. It's a popular tourist attraction in the east Java city of Surabaya, complete with guides offering personal tours and telling the story of how a nation became hooked on kreteks.

With more nicotine and tar than regular tobacco, kreteks account for 90 per cent of the hundreds of billions of cigarettes sold in Indonesia each year. . . .

In Indonesia there are precious few rules and regulations. And unlike in western countries there are fewer restrictions on advertising. Television, cinemas, magazines, billboards, sporting events and concerts all flog tobacco.

In recent years, pop stars Mariah Carey and Alicia Keys have had their names associated with cigarettes. Marketing campaigns aggressively target the young as companies strive to increase sales.

In Indonesia advertising encourages young people to believe that smoking is 'cool!' Ujang Widodo is typical of millions of Indonesians who took up smoking as a teenager.

"There were cigarette advertisements shown during a movie show at the soccer field one night," he said.

"I bought one pack first, then continued buying. . . .

Yet the President's brief boyhood home Indonesia remains, along with North Korea, the only country to shun the World Health Organisation's treaty on Tobacco Control, a treaty that would impose severe restrictions on advertising and ban tobacco sales to youngsters.

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Smoking May Worsen Malnutrition In Developing Nations 

A new study finds that smokers in rural Indonesia finance their habit by dipping into the family food budget - which ultimately results in poorer nutrition for their children. The findings suggest that the costs of smoking in the developing world go well beyond the immediate health risks, according to authors Steven Block and Patrick Webb of Tufts University.

The study is published in the October issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change.

Using surveys of 33,000 mostly poor households in Java, Indonesia, the researchers found that the average family with at least one smoker spends 10 percent of its already tight budget on tobacco. Sixty-eight percent of a smoking family's budget goes to food, and 22 percent for non-food, non-tobacco purchases. The average non-smoking family, on the other hand, spends 75 percent of its income on food and 25 percent for non-food items.

"This suggests that 70 percent of the expenditures on tobacco products are financed by a reduction in food expenditures," the researchers write.

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Up in Smoke: Tobacco Use, Expenditure on Food, and Child Malnutrition in Developing Countries  

This paper explores the impact of expenditure on smoking products in low‐income households on child nutrition, as mediated via reduced food expenditure. On the basis of data from a large household survey in rural Indonesia, the study finds that low‐income households containing at least one smoker tend to divert a significant amount of scarce income to tobacco products and that relatively more of the diversion is drawn from food than from nonfood purchases. This results in a real decline in the quantity and quality of food consumed in the poorest households, which is associated with a statistically significant reduction in the nutritional status of children in those households. In other words, parental smoking increases child malnutrition via its displacement effect on food consumption—an intuitive but rarely documented empirical finding. Attention is needed to finding appropriate mechanisms for enhancing food and nutrition in poorest households in tandem with investments in public health information systems that highlight these indirect, as well as direct, links between smoking and child well‐being.

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Study: Smoking may worsen malnutrition in developing nations  

A new study finds that smokers in rural Indonesia finance their habit by dipping into the family food budget—which ultimately results in poorer nutrition for their children. The findings suggest that the costs of smoking in the developing world go well beyond the immediate health risks, according to authors Steven Block and Patrick Webb of Tufts University.

The study is published in the October issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change.

Using surveys of 33,000 mostly poor households in Java, Indonesia, the researchers found that the average family with at least one smoker spends 10 percent of its already tight budget on tobacco. Sixty-eight percent of a smoking family’s budget goes to food, and 22 percent for non-food, non-tobacco purchases. The average non-smoking family, on the other hand, spends 75 percent of its income on food and 25 percent for non-food items.

“This suggests that 70 percent of the expenditures on tobacco products are financed by a reduction in food expenditures,” the researchers write.

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• Smoking May Worsen Malnutrition In Developing Nations 

A new study finds that smokers in rural Indonesia finance their habit by dipping into the family food budget--which ultimately results in poorer nutrition for their children. The findings suggest that the costs of smoking in the developing world go well beyond the immediate health risks, according to authors Steven Block and Patrick Webb of Tufts University.

The study is published in the October issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change.

Using surveys of 33,000 mostly poor households in Java, Indonesia, the researchers found that the average family with at least one smoker spends 10 percent of its already tight budget on tobacco. Sixty-eight percent of a smoking family's budget goes to food, and 22 percent for non-food, non-tobacco purchases. The average non-smoking family, on the other hand, spends 75 percent of its income on food and 25 percent for non-food items.

"This suggests that 70 percent of the expenditures on tobacco products are financed by a reduction in food expenditures," the researchers write. . . .

The decrease in child nutrition associated with a parent who smokes is "an intuitive but rarely documented empirical finding," the researchers write.

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The combination of direct health threats from smoking coupled with the potential loss of [food] consumption among children linked to tobacco expenditure presents a development challenge of the highest order.
Steven A. Block and Patrick Webb. Up in Smoke: Tobacco Use, Expenditure on Food, and Child Malnutrition in Developing Countries. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 58:1. (October 2009)

• How much did you earn today? How much for your cigarettes? 

Iwan is just one case in the Health Ministry’s data, which shows that 34 percent of citizens more than 15 years old are smokers. The figure is enough to put Indonesia in the world’s top three in terms of the number of smokers, trailing only China and India.

A 2007 study by the Indonesian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (IFPPD, found that 12 million heads of poor families smoke more than 10 cigarettes a day. With more than 60 percent of the Indonesian labor force currently working in the informal sector, more effort should be put into running anti-smoking campaigns for this group, Soekidjo Notoadmodjo, a professor of public health at the University of Indonesia, said.

“Unlike those who work in offices, people who work in the informal sector, like street vendors or public minivan drivers, are not tied down to particular work schedules or regulations,” he said. “Having flexible working hours, and sometimes excessive spare time, they simply consider smoking as a way to kill time and alleviate boredom.”

Bambang Setiaji, an official at the Health Ministry’s Health Promotion Center, said anti-smoking campaigns would be more effective if they shifted away from health reasons and focused on economic concerns. . . .

“It would be more convincing if we told them [the smokers] they could buy a healthy meal for their family instead of a pack of cigarettes,” he said.

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