Indonesia’s Problem With Tobacco
Australian, British and US rock bands including The Smashing Pumpkins and Stereophonics have been urged to withdraw from a music festival in Indonesia because of its tobacco sponsorship. Anti-tobacco activists and health experts from Australia, the United States and Wales have expressed their concern that the bands’ actions will encourage youths to smoke Kiss or other famous brands in a country with high and rising addiction rates.
The country of about 240 million people is one of the last vestiges of laissez-faire tobacco controls in the world and is paying the price in terms of growing rates of addiction, especially among women and children.
Indonesia’s problem with tobacco was graphically illustrated earlier this year with the release of a video on the Internet of a two-year-old Javanese boy with a 40-cigarette-a-day habit.
The Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids said it had written to Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman Billy Corgan asking him to reconsider the band’s headline show at the Java Rockin’Land festival next month.
“We urge The Smashing Pumpkins to demand that the festival organisers eliminate the tobacco sponsorship and any associated branding, and if they fail to do so to pull your band out of the festival,” said the letter, a copy of which was sent to AFP in Jakarta.
“These actions would send a powerful message that The Smashing Pumpkins band members are concerned about the health of the world’s children and will not allow your band’s name, talent and popularity to be used to market deadly and addictive products to children in Indonesia or anywhere else.”
In Australia, health experts have accused local bands The Vines and Wolfmother of ignoring the connection between tobacco marketing and smoking-related deaths.
In an article on the Australian Broadcasting Coorporation’s website, Simon Chapman and Becky Freeman of the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health said the bands would never be allowed to accept such sponsorship in Australia.
“Tobacco industry marketing is a key factor in what is killing people from tobacco caused disease – about six million a year in fact,” they wrote.
Indonesia has “virtually no tobacco control policies”, making it a “tobacco industry paradise where publicity for music festivals like the one Wolfmother and The Vines will participate in wallpaper the country’s media,” they said.
In Britain, anti-smoking group Ash Wales has similarly condemned Welsh band Stereophonics for agreeing to play at the October 8 to 10 festival in Jakarta.
“We urge the Stereophonics to demand the withdrawal of tobacco sponsorship and any associated branding from the festival or alternatively to pull out,” Ash Wales chief executive Tanya Buchanan told Wales Online website Tuesday.
“If the Stereophonics go ahead with a tobacco-sponsored concert they are, by choice, being spokespeople for the tobacco industry and helping them to market to children.”
The festival is being sponsored by Gudang Garam, a major Indonesian producer of clove cigarettes. The company is a regular sponsor of music events targeted at young people, but it claims its only motive is to promote Indonesian music.
Wolfmother has responded to the criticism by saying it does not “support or condemn the sponsors” and will play the gig “for the fans in Indonesia who have parted with their very own cold hard cash”.
Indonesia earns billions of dollars a year in tax revenues from tobacco companies, which employ millions of people across the Southeast Asian country.
It has almost no controls on tobacco marketing, has not signed the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and rarely enforces its own laws against smoking in public places.
Cigarette consumption in the Southeast Asian archipelago soared 47 percent in the 1990s, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
US artists Alicia Keys and Kelly Clarkson refused to play in Indonesia until their promoters dropped tobacco sponsorships.
But several other Western musicians – most recently former Guns’n'Roses guitarist Slash – have played with the backing of the tobacco industry. – AFP
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