Latest attempt to clear haze may be just hot air

Latest attempt to clear haze may be just hot air

Sharmilpal Kaur, The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore

Even as the United States wrapped up its battle against what has been described as the biggest wildfire in the state of Arizona, the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were in the midst of ratifying the first treaty they have signed together to combat the perennial haze problem.

But if the world's richest and most powerful nation has taken nearly a month and more than 4,400 trained firefighters to put out its own fires, why should anyone expect debt-ridden Indonesia to be able to do so easily?

That is one of the questions which some critics are now asking about the ASEAN haze pact, which some view as being just hot air.

After the agreement has been ratified by at least six countries, it will come into force.

It is essentially a framework for ASEAN countries to fight the haze problem together, by setting out the obligations of the members and the preventive measures and responses expected of them.

But with haze already affecting parts of Kalimantan, is the deal dead even before it is ratified?

Law lecturer Simon Tay, also chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, has argued that as ASEAN countries rarely sign a treaty together, when they do the deal is treated very seriously.

Being the most concrete framework for tackling the haze to date, the agreement attempts to get a few institutional structures established.

For one, it establishes a voluntary fund to implement the agreement.

To be known as the ASEAN Transboundary Haze Pollution Control Fund, it is a possible avenue for cash-strapped countries, especially Indonesia, to take to fight the haze, although this will come to pass only if the voluntary contributions pour in.

Another body set in place is the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Transboundary Haze Pollution Control.

This is expected to help member countries work together better to manage the impact of land and forest fires, and the resultant haze pollution.

The agreement is an improvement over previous moves to tackle the haze, although it may not be the ultimate solution.

The haze of 1997 and 1998, which shrouded most of the region, demonstrated the inadequacies of two earlier ASEAN attempts -- the 1995 regional Cooperation Plan on Transboundary Pollution and 1997's Regional Haze Action Plan.

The failure to deal with those fires resulted in damage costing US$9 billion, with Indonesians themselves bearing the brunt of it.

Enforcement, or rather the lack of it, has been given as a major reason for the repeated failure of efforts to control the land-clearing fires.

Local forestry departments in both Sumatra and Kalimantan admit they do not have the tools or the people to fight large- scale fires. Plantation and industrial forest owners use fires illegally to clear land and are rarely prosecuted.

Although Indonesia has access to satellite mapping showing fire locations, under existing Indonesian laws no fire-starter can be prosecuted until the police have proven that the fire was deliberately lit by the landowner.

More can be done, said Peter Moore, coordinator of Project FireFight Southeast Asia, started in 2000 by two world environment bodies -- the World Conservation Union and World Wide Fund for Nature International.

He said: "There has been a number of prosecutions in Indonesia and Malaysia and that is a very welcome development. But there is still so much to be done."

So far, Indonesia has announced that it is prosecuting five plantation companies for using fire to clear land.

This is dismal, considering that most of the time land is cleared through burning.

Also familiar with the problems in Indonesia is Longgena Ginting, campaign director for Walhi, a non-governmental environment group.

He told The Straits Times: "There is a lack of enforcement and there is a lack of capability and capacity to implement the regulations.

"The indication of corruption is clear -- when the fire happens, we find the implications that a company had started it and it had tried to influence an official from Jakarta not to report the activity that caused the fire.

"But this corruption is itself very difficult to prove."

Longgena also highlighted the fact that with Indonesia being required to liberalize its oil palm plantation industry as part of the International Monetary Fund's reforms for the country, more forests will be cleared to make way for plantations, with burning the likely method of choice.

So the root economic causes of the fires are not addressed by the ASEAN agreement, which lacks teeth in other areas as well.

For example, the agreement calls for a central body to coordinate regional cooperation and to act as a focal point to fight the spread of the haze.

But this body cannot tell a country what to do, even if the haze originating from it is choking its neighbors and causing them to lose millions in tourism dollars and medical expenses.

Money and resources aside, there is also the question of whether there is the political will to do something about the fires and haze.

Alan Tan, associate professor and a law lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS), who has been researching the Indonesian forest fires for six years, said:

"One of the most important obligations under the agreement, which is to take legal, administrative and/or other measures to address the problem, depends very much on a state's political will and capacity for action.

States like Indonesia, he said, "remain very stretched in terms of their institutional, financial and technical capacities to address the problem."

He noted that coordinated action among the environmental officials and the forestry and agricultural sectors -- particularly at the local levels where the hot-spots are found -- is needed, given the vast archipelago and its several layers of government.

Victor Savage, an associate professor who heads the Geography department at NUS, noted that the agreement gives ASEAN a more transparent and open system in which member states can work together to minimize the haze.

"The unfortunate problem is that developers see the El Nino issue as a convenient time to clear forest areas in a cheap and effective manner."

To beat the haze, several suggestions were made by Euston Quah, another associate professor and acting head of NUS' economics faculty, in a paper on the haze just published in the international journal World Development.

While fining perpetrators was one way, he said another approach was to pay them not to carry out the burning.

But he added that the amount paid should be equal to or less than the cost of the damage would be.

Quah also threw up the idea of banning the forestry and palm oil industries from burning during the dry season. This way, corporations could still resort to burning during the wet season, but there would be less damage.

Taking this a step further, perhaps fires could be allowed to burn at one go during the wet season, clearing the land for a year or two. This could mean alternate haze years, with burning banned during an El Nino year.

Perhaps allowing burning in a controlled manner might be easier to achieve than enforcing a no-burning ban.

Either way, no one should expect a haze-free ASEAN any time soon.