Tobacco road map leads to dead end
The road to Morogoro in 2015. Note the bags of charcoal offered for sale on the roadside. While charcoal production is believed to account for the lion’s share of deforestation in Tanzania, critics are eager to point fingers at tobacco farmers, who use wood for curing.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court has annulled the Industry Ministry’s tobacco road map, which aimed to increase cigarette production by 5.0-7.4 percent per year, from 2015 to 2020, according to a story in The Jakarta Post.
“The road map’s annulment is final,” said a spokesman for an anti-tobacco coalition, Tubagus Haryo Karbyanto.
“The industry minister can do nothing but revoke it,” he said in Jakarta on Tuesday.
The request for a judicial review of the 2015 decree on the tobacco road map, Haryo said, had been based on the fact that the Industry Ministry’s policy had contravened five regulations, including the 1999 Human Rights Law, the 2002 Child Protection Law and the 2009 Health Law.
He said that if the tobacco industry had followed the road map, Indonesia would have been producing 524.2 billion cigarettes annually from 2020.
At the same time, the government’s 2015-2019 medium term development plan sought to cut the country’s smoking prevalence among those under 18 years of age from 7.2 percent in 2013 to 5.3 percent in 2019.
So the road map seemed not to be in line with the government’s target given that it was not stipulated clearly on the road map whether producers should export most of their products.
Haryo said that people had to be on the lookout for other similar rules in the future.
“The fight against tobacco is like a never-ending story,” he added.