Call for stronger tobacco warning

JAKARTA (JP): The government warning on cigarette packs, "Smoking can be detrimental to your health," is too weak to make people give up smoking, a consumer activist says.

Zoemrotin K.S. of the Indonesian Consumers Foundation said Monday: "The language on the label is still too vague. It should say that smoking kills or smoking causes cancer.

"The warning well reflects the government's ambivalence to the the dangers and consequences of smoking," she told a workshop on Efforts to Increase the Quality of Life of the Younger Generation.

Kompas daily reported Monday that Indonesians were the world's fourth worst smokers in 1996, up from the fifth worst in 1994.

A paper compiled by Ascobat Gani, Anwar Yusuf, Sardikin Giriputra and Mardiati Nadjib of University of Indonesia's medical school said the country's average tobacco consumption per capita was 1.4 kilograms in 1990. This means that Indonesians consumed a total 266,000 tons of tobacco that year.

According to the World Bank's calculations, every 1,000 tons of tobacco consumed caused about US$27.2 million (Rp 65 billion) in economic losses, the paper said. Therefore Indonesia would have lost about $7.2 billion in 1990.

In that year, health care expenditure was about $2.8 billion, or 2.5 percent of GDP. The government shoulders about 30 percent of health care expenditure, while the economic cost of tobacco consumption is estimated to be three times larger than total health care expenditure. Therefore, smoking cost the country up to 8.5 times more than the government's expenditure on health care in 1990.

A survey by Anwar Yusuf in 1994 said that 12.8 percent of fifth and sixth graders were smokers.

In another survey he conducted that year, 41.5 percent of 1,000 adults surveyed had begun smoking when they were between 15 and 22 years of age, 31 percent had begun between 10 and 17 and 11 percent had begun when they were less than 10 years old.

The Anti Smoking Foundation's survey of young street traders last year in Pasar Minggu, South Jakarta, indicated that children aged between 14 and 19 years spent 25 percent of their income on cigarettes.

The workshop proposed that the community should try to promote smoke-free healthy living, advocacy, restrictions on cigarette promotions and the imposition of more progressive and aggressive taxes on cigarettes.

"It is a concern since smokers are getting younger and younger," said economist Fahmi Idris, who strongly supports the fight against smoking. (40)