Burning forests

Burning forests

One might have thought that three years after the calamitous
forest and plantation fires that ravaged large tracts of
productive forest and plantation lands in Sumatra and Kalimantan,
some kind of effective mechanism could have been put in place to
control what are, after all, predictable man-made disasters.

No such luck. As of the middle of this week weather satellites
spotted some 1,200 fires burning once again on both those
islands. The fires, starting in the mainland Riau area, have
since spread southward and are beginning to threaten the
neighboring provinces of Jambi and South Sumatra.

So far, the authorities appear to have managed to bring the
situation more or less under their control, in part because rains
have helped put out some of the fires. But considering that these
areas of the Indonesian archipelago are on the threshold of the
dry season, which is expected to start in earnest next month, the
possibility of a worsening of the situation cannot be dismissed.

In Pekanbaru, the provincial capital of the oil-rich province
of Riau, pollution readings have reached 200 or more --
unhealthy, in the common vernacular. The smoke has also reached
Singapore, where the authorities were reported yesterday to have
begun distributing surgical masks, although pollution index
readings are still relatively low. The United Nations Environment
Program has expressed concern over the possibility of the fires
reaching the scale of the 1997-1998 disaster when the haze from
forest and plantation fires smothered not only large areas in
Sumatra and Java and some other islands but also blanketed large
areas in other countries of Southeast Asia.

The help that is at present coming from other countries in
this region in the form of trainers to train Indonesian fire
fighters helps and is of course welcome. But if the recurrence of
the huge environmental disaster of three years ago is to be
effectively prevented, earnest measures will have to be taken at
home.

To precisely avert such a recurrence, the government has
warned plantation owners to heed the law and threatens to punish
those guilty of causing forest fires. But though the government
certainly deserves to be commended for its rather swift reaction
to the danger, many observers doubt that this will be enough to
prevent a bigger conflagration. One major reason, as one
government official in Sumatra admits, is that the sanctions
prescribed by the law have in the past proven to be ineffective
because the law punishes only those burning the forests, and not
plantations, where many of the forest fires start.

There may be other reasons why the fight against forest fires
has so far been mostly ineffective. On such reason which is
seldom reported but which many people suspect, is money taking by
corrupt forestry inspectors or wardens whose duty it is to stop
and prevent the practice of land clearing by burning. For
unscrupulous companies bent only on making as much money as they
can from their land concessions, it pays to pay off inspectors
and wardens because burning is a land clearing technique that is
both effective and cheap.

In the meantime, this country and others in the region
continue to be plagued every year by haze hazards that impair the
health of people and wrecks the tourist industry, while Indonesia
continues to lose large amounts of its already badly despoiled
forest resources every year.

Now is the time, while a government committed to reform and
the eradication of corruption is in power in Jakarta, for
Indonesia to take convincing measures and prepare adequate laws
to stop this depletion of the country's once-rich natural
treasures. Even at the present level of destruction it will take
many decades and possibly generations to regain what is already
lost through greed and neglect.