All because of a boy

What harm could a little boy do? A lot, if his name is El Nio, which is Spanish for "The Little Boy". In the past few months, El Nio has wreaked havoc across the globe, manifesting itself in different shapes and catastrophes, from drought and forest fires, to floods and storms. The drought has caused crop failures in many parts of the world, which in turn has led to food shortages and worse still, diseases and famine. It has caused health hazards, environmental degradation, including destruction of priceless coral reefs in the Pacific, and upset marine life and the lives of birds.

El Nio, which starts from unusually high temperatures in the eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru, is not a new phenomenon. It occurs in cycles of five to seven years. But weather experts agree that the calamities it has caused this time around have been the worst ever, at least if one looks at the last 150 years.

In terms of its impacts on Indonesia, El Nio certainly has never been as severe for as long as our memory serves.

Indonesia is one of many countries which have been at the receiving end of The Little Boy's menace. The country's location at the western end of the Pacific, and its sheer geographical size makes it a prime target for the pranks that El Nio has been playing.

A severe drought has triggered forest fires, mostly in Sumatra and Kalimantan, but also in Java, Sulawesi, Maluku and Irian Jaya. The fires in turn have caused thick haze which has disrupted the lives of millions of people not only in Indonesia, but also in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

Crop failures in Indonesia have not been so severe as to create a food shortage at a national level, but many streams have dried up in Irian Jaya due to the drought depriving many remote villages of their only outside access. Some 400 people in these isolated villages have died from food shortage and diseases related to the drought. What is so tragic is that this has been happening while the rest of the nation watch almost helplessly because of transportation difficulties.

The recent revelation by international weather experts that this is the worst El Nio for a long time has taken some of the pressure off the government -- which had had to bear the brunt of criticism from the public and from our neighbors for its inability to contain the forest fires and the resulting haze problems.

Most of the forest fires at one time had also been blamed on timber and plantation companies deliberately setting fires to clear up land for their businesses. There is no doubt they contributed to the fires, just as some nomadic forest tribes have through their traditional slash-and-burn farming practices.

But even as we agree that El Nio has triggered the disasters that have hit our country during these past few months, one is still left wondering how much of these have been compounded by man-made activities, such as setting fire to forests or even our own neglect of the environment. One also wonders if the government has really done everything in its power to contain the problem and whether it has been responsive enough, given that the first signs of El Nio's visit had been detected by our very own Meteorology and Geophysics Agency as far back as May.

At this late stage, when the government, with international help, is fighting all-out to extinguish the forest fires and eliminate the haze, there is no sense in continuing to look for scapegoats. Since we agree that The Little Boy should take the larger blame, we should ask ourselves what have we learned from all of this.

One thing is that it has taught us that all the technology in the world cannot conquer nature, and that we have to live with nature. It has also taught us to take weather forecasts more seriously than most of us have done in the past. In short, we have to be ready for the worst kind of climatic phenomena.

The weather experts' claim that this is the worst attack by El Nio for 150 years should not make us complacent of the future. The Little Boy obviously never acts his age, and we can never be sure that the next time he visits us again, his pranks will be any less severe.