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.