Indonesians Cleave to Clove Cigarettes

A young woman uses scissors to snip the tobacco strands at either end of the cigarette while her partner rolls another with frenetic speed.

The partner puts clove-spiked tobacco on a small sheet of cloth and deftly wraps it in a pre-glued piece of paper.

It’s midday. Hot. The air thick with the smell of cloves.

Working since five in the morning, the pair should be on about their 6,000th cigarette of the day for Indonesia’s PT Djarum company.

“Hand rollers are paid by the number they produce,” said staff manager Sugiyanto Utomo, explaining the speed at which the women work.

Sweat dripping from his forehead, he gestured around the cavernous shed where 500 women, mostly young farmers’ wives, sit at long benches rolling the pungent clove cigarettes, a favorite Indonesian indulgence, at one of the largest such manufacturers.

The clove cigarette industry is so labor intensive, and much of heavily populated central Java so poor, that the government will not let makers abandon hand-rolled cigarettes completely.

A large proportion of Djarum’s 27,000 workers still roll and pack the clove cigarettes, or kretek , by hand.

“The average worker gets at least 3,500 rupiah (about $2) a day producing about 4,000 cigarettes,” Sugiyanto said, stressing that most produce and earn much more.

That, coupled with an annual bonus, gives the women far more than the average Indonesian income of $500 a year.

Cloves were one of the spices that enticed European merchants and colonizers to the tropical islands of Indonesia in search of fabulous wealth and ways to enliven European dinner tables.

Several hundred years later, the little clove flower finds its most ardent fan in Indonesian smokers, who puff well over 100 billion kretek cigarettes a year.

The country grows and exports some of the world’s finest tobacco. But most Indonesian smokers, whether cabinet members or peasants, prefer cigarettes heavily laced with the dark brown, woody spice.

Kretek , a Javanese onomatopoeia, describes the crackle and spitting of burning cloves, and it was at Kudus, a smallish town in central Java, that the kretek was invented.

A little over 100 years ago, Kudus asthma sufferer Haji Jamahri tried cloves as a cure.

From rubbing clove oil on his chest he progressed to chewing cloves, and finally the most effective method, mixing ground cloves with pipe tobacco.

The kretek was born.

Although no manufacturer now actively promotes this aspect of their product, kretek packets do not carry any health warning. Indonesia does not have an anti-smoking lobby.

PT Djarum, spawned by Haji Jamahri’s discovery, is the biggest--or second biggest, depending on who’s talking--producer of kretek in the country. It tussles for the top spot with PT Gudang Garam, located farther east in Java.

Kretek sales raised nearly $600 million in duty for the government last year from the 10 major manufacturers.

The firms prefer not to open their books to public scrutiny, but their owners, mostly ethnic Chinese families, are reputed to be among Indonesia’s wealthiest.

The kretek , and increasingly the machine-rolled version considered more sophisticated, is fast taking over from ordinary tobacco. In eight years, market share for ordinary tobacco has plunged from 40% to just over 10%.

“It’s hard to say what the difference is,” one addict said. “Once I tried foreign cigarettes, but kretek is still the best.”

Most Indonesians seem to feel much the same. As the Djarum company handbook says, “Cigarettes must be able to deliver maximum ecstasy and peace of mind.”