Indonesia set to take top spot

Indonesia is expected to become the country with the biggest population of tobacco smokers during the next decade, according to a story in The Jakarta Post.

Currently, the country is in fourth place, behind China, Russia and the US.

“If we don’t prevent and control the impacts of smoking, then there’s a chance we will become the world’s largest tobacco consumer in the next 10 years,” the Health Ministry’s disease control director general, Muhammad Subuh, said during an event to mark World No Tobacco Day on May 31.

While other countries with high levels of smoking are enacting tobacco controls, Indonesia is said to have made only minor efforts to do the same.

Since 2015, the government has banned tobacco advertising in the mass media, on public transportation and in all public places, and any form of such advertising aimed at minors.

But the Post said that even though tobacco-related diseases claimed 200,000 lives in Indonesia every year, the government had refused to become a party to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which meant there were only loose cigarette controls.

The country, it said, had been dubbed the tobacco industry’s playground.

The Industry Ministry’s 2015 tobacco industry ‘road map’ indicated that the government was supporting the tobacco industry by planning to double cigarette production to 524.2 billion a year by 2020.

“If we see the road map, we can just imagine our little children being told to smoke,” the Health Ministry’s director of non-communicable diseases, Lily Sulistyowati, was said to have told the Post.