Human negligence intensifies Mother Nature's fury

By Sugianto Tandra

JAKARTA (JP): A long drought and the resulting forest fires, haze, famine and deaths that plagued Indonesia in the past year have all been blamed on the El Nino weather pattern affecting the region.

But at least one accusatory finger should have been pointed at ourselves.

Human negligence resulted in the country's worst natural disaster. Although authorities and experts issued early warnings of the impending problems, few seemed to take heed of them.

But experts now agree that the fires which ravaged thousands of hectares of forest and land in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Irian Jaya, and Java, were partly caused by neglect as well as ignorance about the pollution-induced changing global climate.

Reckless logging for domestic and export purposes, and plantation companies' land clearing practices were cited as one cause of the fires. On a smaller scale, slash-and-burn land clearing activities by nomadic farmers was also to blame.

Altogether, they brought about an environmental catastrophe labeled a "planetary disaster" by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Had it not been for the thick smog covering Kalimantan and Sumatra and some parts of Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand -- resulting in an international outcry -- this year's forest fires would have been dismissed as a routine annual occurrence.

But this year, the impact was far worse.

The Ministry of Forestry, which assessed the damage caused by fires which affected 165,000 hectares of forest, estimated a Rp 132 billion (US$26.4 million) loss. The figure does not include ecological damage such as destroyed habitats and forest ecosystems, or the financial losses of timber estates and plantation companies.

More than 650 people died of drought-related diseases, while many others are still in danger of malnutrition in remote areas of Indonesia.

Still hundreds of others have died in traffic accidents blamed on poor visibility because of the smog. For instance, a Garuda Indonesia Airbus A-300 crashed in a haze-shrouded area while approaching the North Sumatran town of Medan on Sept. 26, killing all 234 people on board.

Across the country, 6,356 flights in 27 airports had to be canceled because of poor visibility, resulting in a financial loss of Rp 49.34 billion.

While officials have estimated the area of damaged forest at about 300,000 hectares, the WWF and the Indonesian Environment Forum (Walhi) have estimated the area to be more than one million hectares.

This adds to the damage wrought by the 1982 fires which affected about 3.6 million hectares of land and forest in East Kalimantan. Experts said after 15 years, the forest and land had not recovered.

"It is an international disaster that goes beyond the borders of Indonesia," said Sayed Babar Ali, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

State Minister of Environment Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, who fought a commendable battle against the fires, said it would take hundreds of years for the forests to recover.

So huge was the impact of this year's fires that President Soeharto, who declared the fires and the haze a national disaster, had to make an unprecedented apology to the affected neighboring countries in September. He apologized again the following month.

Logging

Also this year, the government for the first time pointed at large logging and plantation companies as being responsible for the disaster.

Armed with satellite images, a visibly overwrought Sarwono announced to the public in September that many of the fires had started on land leased to large logging and plantation companies, some even owned by politically well-connected tycoons.

He also said "uncivilized" businesspeople were to blame.

"Whatever is set on fire, will be completely burned down. Some people only intended to burn one hectare but the fire spread way beyond that," Sarwono said.

More than 100 companies had their wood-use permits revoked. But repeated pledges by the President and some of his ministers to crack down on those companies had little tangible effect, while millions of innocent people had to pay the price.

Officials estimated 20 million people in the country, including children, could suffer from the long-term carcinogenic effects of exposure to the smoke.

For instance in Jambi, one of the hardest hit provinces in Sumatra, air pollution rocketed above safety levels. At one time, there was a dense 2,000 milligrams of suspended particles per cubic meter of air.

The danger level is 100 milligrams.

A similar health alert was also sparked in Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, Kalimantan, where concentration of suspended particles reached 700 milligrams per cubic meter.

Residents had to wear gas masks in the street. Officials said there was a marked rise in the number of people suffering from respiratory ailments, asthma and lung bronchitis.

The Indonesian government and Malaysia drew up contingency plans to evacuate people in some of the hardest hit areas. The huge scale of the disaster also prompted the international community to send relief to victims and hundreds of personnel to Indonesia to help fight the fires.

Late this year, the long-awaited rain started, putting out some of the fires and clearing the haze. Eastern Indonesia, however, remained parched. Food shortages and widespread disease in remote Irian Jaya and Maluku provinces still posed a threat.

The costly price of negligence is still haunting us.

It hopefully bode well, therefore, that this year of environmental disasters was closed by an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) environmental ministers' meeting on haze.

At the end of their two-day conference on Dec. 22 and Dec. 23, the ministers issued an action plan calling for, among others, specific measures to prevent and monitor land and forest fires, and to strengthen the capability to fight them.