$4.4b up in smoke due to 'poor govt policy'

$4.4b up in smoke due to 'poor govt policy'

JAKARTA (JP): Two international environmental organizations
charged yesterday that poorly designed government policy helped
escalate last year's calamitous forest fires in Sumatra and
Kalimantan which, according to fresh estimates, caused US$4.4 in
damages.

A report released by the Singapore-based Economy and
Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) and World Wide
Fund for Nature (WWF) said the estimate was "conservative" since
it excluded immeasurable factors such as the long-term impact on
health and biodiversity loss.

"The tragedy is that these fires were largely preventable,"
WWF forest conservation advisor Togu Manurung said in a statement
received here yesterday.

"Tropical rain forests don't burn easily, even under drought
conditions. Indonesian forests have been degraded by years of
poor forestry practices, that's why they are so susceptible to
fires set by people."

Timothy Jessup, WWF's senior policy advisor in Jakarta,
pointed to a series of poorly designed policies which actually
helped fan the fires.

These include a program to drain and convert one million
hectares of peat forest for rice cultivation. Fires in these
former wetlands have been the most difficult to extinguish and
created haze laden with sulfuric acid.

Unclear land ownership laws encouraged people and companies to
clear land as a way of staking a claim and they used fire for the
task.

He also noted that policies which kept the prices of wood
supplied to processing mills low, provided little incentive to
protect standing timber or to sell scrap wood rather than burn
it.

Furthermore, it was noted that short-term leases of forest
land to timber companies also left little incentive for
sustainable management.

"Changing these policies should be front and center in the new
government's reform program," Jessup said.

The EEPSEA/WWF report put fire-related losses at $3 billion,
while the haze-related impact was estimated at over $1.4 billion.

"This is more than the damages assessed for the Exxon Valdez
oil spill and India's Bhopal chemical spill combined," EEPSEA
director David Glover said referring to two past major
environmental disasters.

"The resources lost would have been more than enough to
provide basic sanitation, water sewage services for Indonesia's
120 million rural poor."

The principal fire-related damages include $493 million in
timber losses, $470 million in foregone agricultural production,
$1.8 billion in ecological services provided to the people by
forests such as water supply, food and medicine, and another $272
million for the contribution to global warming from the release
of carbon.

"While global warming will be felt by the rest of the world,
the other fire damages were suffered mainly by Indonesia itself,"
the EPSEA/WWF statement said.

More than five million hectares of forest, plantation, and
land in Indonesia were razed by the fires last year. Over 70
million people throughout the Southeast Asia region were affected
by the resulting haze.

The method used to calculate the damages was derived from
satellite mapping studies of razed forests in Sumatra and
Kalimantan by the National University of Singapore's Center for
Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing (CRISP), with adjustments
by EEPSEA and WWF for areas burned outside the provinces.

These were then calculated with per hectare values for various
vegetation types and land uses. (aan)