Djakarta; croakers.

One aspect of the worldwide gourmet revolution has been a dramatic increase in the consumption of frogs' legs, of which Indonesia is a major producer. This has resulted in a reduction in the number of the batrachians that inhabit the steamy tropical wetlands abundant in this equatorial climate, and there have been murmurs of dire environmental consequences. For example, farmers have been obliged to use more chemical pesticides than usual owing to the increase in the number of mosquitoes and other insects that prey upon crops. At the same time, international wildlife authorities are saying that frog-hunting on the present scale--Indonesia exports something like 3,500 tons of frogs' legs a year--could prove disastrous for tropical systems, breaking major aquatic food chains, and animal-rights activists in Europe say that the batrachians are slaughtered cruelly to boot. In some regions, growth of a deleterious plant infection has been blamed on the rise in the number of frog-hunters, generally rice-farmers who go out into the paddies with nets and scoops at sunset. On the consumer side, there are worries that the use of pesticides in India and Bangladesh (big frogs'-legs producers) as well as in Indonesia may poison the flesh. Some shipments of Indonesian frogs' legs have been rejected by American customs authorities as being infected with salmonella bacteria. Finally, according to some Islamic teaching, the frog is an unclean beast and may not be eaten, and as Indonesia has the biggest Moslem population in the world, the question is of importance. The status of this problem so far, according to the deliberations of a group of Moslem scholars convened to consider it, is that Moslems may raise frogs but not breed them.