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)