Companies allow fires to worsen: Sarwono

Companies allow fires to worsen: Sarwono

JAKARTA (JP): State Minister of Environment Sarwono
Kusumaatmadja lashed out yesterday at "the big bosses" of logging
and plantation companies who he said have allegedly caused forest
fires to worsen to the point of "near disaster".

He also berated company owners for letting other people,
especially small-scale farmers, take the blame for the resulting
thick smoke that has affected the islands of Sumatra and
Kalimantan and several neighboring countries.

He said the government has not yet declared this year's forest
fires as "national disasters" but was close to doing so, pointing
out that more than 20 million people were now facing respiratory
problems due to the smoke.

He also threatened to disclose the names of those companies if
they failed to stop clearing land by burning trees and shrubs.

Millions of people both here and abroad "without access or
channels to express their plight" have been affected by smoke
caused by fires that have ravaged more than 100,000 hectares of
land in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

Sarwono scaled down yesterday the earlier figure of 300,000
hectares to 100,000 hectares of ravaged land.

"While bosses of large plantations just walk into their air-
conditioned offices if the situation becomes too smoky, these
voiceless people have to take all the blame and suffer from the
suffocating smoke," Sarwono said.

The farmers, who were repeatedly blamed for the bush fires,
were actually "subcontractors" of big plantation companies, he
said yesterday after opening a workshop on environmental
protection here.

Sarwono said he was "greatly enraged" by plantation owners who
took the environmental crisis lightly or who were not even aware
of the "very serious conditions".

"Unless they stop (the practice of clearing land by burning
trees), I'll go public with the companies' names," he threatened.

Sarwono revealed that his counterparts from neighboring
countries were "amazed at how calm we've been" in the face of the
crisis.

However, he said he was quite happy that the Ministry of
Agriculture ordered the plantations to help deal with the crisis.
A special fund was also allotted for the fight against forest
fires, but Sarwono did not say the amount of the fund.

Actions taken by the government so far, according to Sarwono,
include studying the possibility of cloud seeding -- a method
which he dubbed as the "most feasible" compared to other means,
such as water-bombing.

The ministries of forestry and agriculture have also banned
land clearing through burning, and threatened to revoke the
licenses of recalcitrant companies.

The Environmental Impact Management Agency, which Sarwono
chairs, routinely distributes satellite data about the spread of
the forest fires to related authorities in the hope that real
measures will be taken accordingly.

Satellite images have shown at least three hot spots in
Central Kalimantan that have never ceased burning. "They could be
underground peat moss fires, which only big downpours can help
put out," he said.

As for the fires that have already spread and continued,
Sarwono said that there was not much the government could do
about it.

Sarwono's office has estimated that about 30 million cubic
meters of timber is destroyed by fires each year.

The haze caused by the fires led Kuala Lumpur to close its
airport briefly this month, and there have been closures of
Indonesian airports as well. Shipping traffic has also been hit
by poor visibility.

Climatologists have predicted that the current dry season
would last until late this year, relating the prolonged weather
phenomena with the much-feared El Nio, an abnormal tropical
Pacific Ocean weather pattern believed to have caused droughts
and floods across the continents of Asia, Africa, and South
America. (aan)