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Urgent calls for action on Indonesia's child smokers

Not enough is done to dissuade youngsters from starting bad habit
Urgent calls for action on Indonesia's child smokers
Children at a railway station
Published: April 12, 2012 07:40 AM GMT
Updated: April 13, 2012 02:21 AM GMT

Nine-year-old Amin is sitting in a filthy, crowded alley outside one of Jakarta’s busiest railway stations, puffing clouds of smoke from his cigarette. “I started to smoke when I was seven,” he says. It was curiosity that got him started, when he saw adults around him doing it, and before long he was hooked. Now, by any standards, he is a heavy smoker. With little sympathy or protection from his parents, who are themselves desperately poor, Amin gets no schooling. He subsists through begging on the streets and around the stations. “I make almost 20,000 rupiah (about US$2) a day,” he says. He spends some of that on cigarettes, which he is able to buy from any shop or the vendors who throng the streets. But in Indonesia, Amin is by no means exceptional.  A 2007 study threw up some startling statistics: 1.9 percent of children start to smoke as early as four years old; two million children aged under 10 have sampled a cigarette; and the number of teenage smokers jumped from 71,000 in 1995 to 426,000 in 2007. While smoking in many regions, including some parts of Asia, is generally on the decline, it is actually on the rise in Indonesia, the only ASEAN country that has not agreed the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FTCT). On the contrary, it places relatively low taxes on tobacco and allows cigarette promotions and incentives that could be seen as encouraging to young people. In some parts of the country, including Jakarta, smoking in public places is banned but the rule is not rigidly enforced. One observer commented: “On one hand, the government is duty bound to improve people’s health. On the other hand, it surrenders all the time to pressure from the cigarette firms and tobacco farmers, in fact it depends on contributions from them.” Arist Merdeka Sirait, chairman of the National Commission for Children’s Protection, believes it is time to call a halt. “The level of addiction in Indonesia has reached red alert and needs to be dealt with immediately,” he says. “It’s time for the government and decision makers at all levels to stand up for Indonesian children and challenge the tobacco industry’s aggressive marketing of their addictive products through advertisements and sponsorships.”  

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