Indonesia’s Killer Commodity

Picture: Author

In an article by the New Mandala, Marina Welker studies the production and consumption of the kretek clove cigarette in Sampoerna, Indonesia.

The dominant position cigarette ads command in Indonesian public space raise questions of tobacco justice and labour that were central to my research on Indonesia’s cigarette market. This market—the world’s second largest—is striking for its size, unique product composition, and gender disparities. Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Indonesians were smoking over 300 billion cigarettes a year. 95% of cigarettes sold in Indonesia are laced with cloves and called kretek, which onomatopoeically evokes the crackling sound they make when clove fragments ignite. So-called white cigarettes (rokok putih) without cloves make up only 5% of the market. In a country where about two out of three men smoke, boys and men experience social pressure to demonstrate adult masculinity by smoking. Girls and women are discouraged from smoking but exposed to environmental smoke in the majority of homes and workplaces.

My research focused on Sampoerna, Indonesia’s largest clove cigarette company, which was founded in 1913 by Liem Seeng Tee, a Chinese migrant. The company was primarily owned and operated by Liem’s descendants until Philip Morris International (PMI) acquired it in 2005. My recent book Kretek Capitalism shows that the cigarette industry in Indonesia is sustained through an extraordinary amount of paid and unpaid labour on the part of employees, contractors, retailers, community groups, artists, influencers, and consumers.