亚广展览集团

Pastika honored for rejecting tobacco fair

An antitobacco organization honored Bali Governor Made MangkuPastika on Tuesday for his courage in standing up to the tobacco industry to reject a tobacco fair initially intended to be held on the island.

Pastika was conferred the award “for his courage and principles that placed his people’s public health interests above profits”, said BungonRitthiphakdee, director of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA).

Bali Health Agency head for disease control and environmental sanitation (P2PL), WiraSunetra, represented Pastika, who failed to attend the event due to other meetings, to receive the plaque.

Pastika recently rejected holding the planned Inter-Tabac tobacco conference on the island, which was scheduled for Feb. 27 to 28. The decision was made following strong protests from antitobacco activists and health practitioners.

The event was initiated by German-based Westfalenhallen Dortmund GmbH and supported by Dortmund Mayor UllrichSierau.

The rejection was not just by local parties. An online petition at change.org was also signed by health professionals from several countries across the globe demanding Pastika reject the event. The petition generated more than 12,000 signatures.

Earlier in the day, SEATCA collaborated with the University of Indonesia’s Demography Institute to hold a seminar at Legian Beach Hotel to discuss the earmarking of tobacco excise control funds.

PrakitVatheesatogkit, advisor to Thailand’s health promotion foundation ThaiHealth, said that Indonesia should establish an independent public agency, defined by a law, to manage the tobacco funds in the country.

ThaiHealth is an independent state agency set up according to Thailand’s 2001 Health Promotion Act, and is funded by tobacco surcharge taxes and alcohol excise taxes, reaching up to US$140 million in 2013.

Vatheesatogkit said that healthcare services provided from the funds should not be managed by the Health Ministry alone.

Indonesia is in urgent need of a healthcare program specifically designed to manage the state revenue from tobacco excise, which reached Rp 95 trillion ($8.19 billion) in 2012 from around 338 billion cigarettes.

Data shows that the number of smokers in the country has increased massively in the last two decades. In 1995, Indonesia had 34.8 million active smokers, while this had risen to around 62.3 million by 2012.

The Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) in 2011 showed that Indonesia had the third-highest smoking prevalence, at 36.1 percent. Bangladesh and Russia topped the list with 43.3 percent and 39.4 percent, respectively.

In fact, funds could even be higher. AsteraPrimanto Bhakti, director of the Finance Ministry’s center for state revenue policy, said that big tobacco companies avoided paying tax by having affiliated companies to lower their excise tariff.

“In fact, 95.3 percent of excise revenues come from tobacco,” he said.

Adjianto, fund balancing director at the Finance Ministry, said that the tobacco excise revenue was used, among others, to enhance tobacco quality for it to have a lesser amount of nicotine and to establish better healthcare services for smoking-related diseases.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian Cigarette Producers Association (Gapri) said that the government’s plan to apply graphic health warnings on cigarette packs would hurt manufacturers. The latter’s decision to charge 10 percent tax in addition to excise duty in 2015 would burden them even more, Gapri said, thus possibly shutting down many
businesses.