Govt says it's ready to cope with drought

Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government claimed on Friday it had prepared adequate precautionary measures to ensure that the longer-than-expected dry season would not trigger further forest fires and adversely affect rice output.

Director general for forest management and natural resources conservation at the Ministry of Forestry I Made Subadia said the government would allocate some US$8 million mainly to educate locals to prevent and stop forest fires.

"We have been training our staff in five major provinces of West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, Riau, North Sumatra and Jambi to tackle forest fires," he told The Jakarta Post.

Made said some 30 to 50 staff members in West Kalimantan had participated in the training program and were expected to share their knowledge with volunteers and local people to save their forests.

"In West Kalimantan, the approach managed to encourage a consensus among local people not to burn forests any longer for land clearing," Made said.

Made said the government had replaced the old fires management tools with the new ones to maximize efforts to stop fires.

"In total, we'll allocate some Rp 70 billion (US$7.86 million) to enact the plan to minimize forest fires this year," he said.

The Meteorology and Geophysics Agency announced on Thursday forest fire-prone provinces of South Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, Riau and North Sumatra would have to endure at least an extra month of the dry conditions this year.

Months before the forest fires flared up, a disaster mitigation team warned that the dry season would last until December, and urged the government to take action to prevent and stop forest fires.

The team has criticized the government for ignoring the early warnings.

Several people have died or fell seriously ill due to the effects of the choking haze resulting from the fires.

The team said the measures to cope with forest fires would be inadequate, and that forestry agencies in Kalimantan and Sumatra were reluctant to investigate actual sources of the fires.

The government has officially blamed individual local farmers for the fires which have consumed tens of thousands of hectares of forest land, but environmentalists say there is strong evidence to suggest that forestry conglomerates in collusion with certain officials have annually engaged in the burning practices. The motivation cited most often is the giant government- subsidized reforestation zones wherein the company collects the reforestation funds, but never plants, and instead sets fire to the zone so it is then cleared of the responsibility to spend time and money replanting.

Meanwhile, director general for food production management M. Jafar Hafsah said the agricultural ministry would mainly distribute to farmers top quality paddy seeds, which need less time to harvest.

He said he would also urge farmers to grow seedlings in another place for one month, before planting them in their fields.

Some rice producing areas in Java and Sumatra will also be hit by the protracted dry season, thus delaying the paddy cultivation.

Separately, the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL) criticized the government for their slow action to cope with the recent forest fires.

ICEL program deputy Fathi Hanif urged the government to take, among others, preventive action against the fires and cooperate with other Southeast Asian countries to mitigate the disaster, which has become an annual occurrence since 1997.