Lost in a haze again

Lost in a haze again

At long last, the authorities seem to be taking action to halt
the further spread of the wildfires that have already upset
flight schedules and threatened the health of whole populations
in a number of regions here, as well as wreaking havoc in
neighboring countries.

Over the weekend, authorities in Riau province were reported
to have taken an executive of a local plantation company into
custody on suspicion of ordering people to clear several
thousands of hectares of land by burning. In addition, two local
district administrators were questioned by police over their
alleged roles in the crime.

These steps are none too soon, given that the so-called "hot
spots" seen by satellite imaging in Riau province alone reached
into the thousands during the past week. So serious and recurring
has the haze problem become that the authorities in Malaysia have
threatened to raise the issue at the ASEAN regional level. The
exasperation on the part of the Malaysian authorities is easy to
understand. Haze coming from fires in Riau has in the past days
blanketed the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur and is
threatening to adversely affect that country's tourist industry.

To be sure, clearing land by burning is nothing new in
Indonesia. Lacking modern tools to make the job of land clearing
faster and easier, indigenous populations on many of the islands
of this vast archipelago have for generations resorted to what
sociologists and agricultural experts refer to as slash-and-burn
land clearing.

Some experts hold that aside from saving much of the manual
labor that would otherwise be necessary, this method also helps
to improve the fertility of the land thus cleared, at least in
the short term. One drawback to this technique, however, is that
after the fertility of the land has been exhausted, the farmers
are compelled to move on to a new plot of land, where the same
process is repeated, over and over again.

Many experts, however, consider this traditional manner of
clearing land for personal use to be relatively harmless because
only small plots of land are involved, and is nothing compared to
the wholesale burning of thousands of hectares of land at a time
for commercial purposes. According to one estimate, Indonesia is
losing some there million hectares of forest and uncultivated
land every year to slash-and-burn farming.

Given the serious health and economic problems caused by the
haze from these fires, it is surprising that so little has so far
been done to take on the issue in earnest. A wildfire on a
massive scale, after all, was reported for the first time here in
the early 1980s, when fires burning in Kalimantan sent veils of
smoke over neighboring Singapore and Malaysia.

Forest fires have since occurred almost annually in growing
numbers on several islands, especially Kalimantan and Sumatra.
Neither have Singapore and Malaysia been the only victims of the
resulting haze. Thick smoke upset flight schedules at Sultan
Syarif Kasim airport in Pekanbaru, Riau's provincial capital,
during the past week and, more recently, spreading forest fires
have threatened to surround the West Kalimantan provincial
capital of Pontianak.

So far, it has seemed that the authorities are more or less
powerless to contain the problem, simply relying on rain to put
out the fires. Last week's police action against people suspected
of having some responsibility for the fires in Riau, however,
shows that something can certainly be done, as long as the
authorities have the will and the courage to act.

Of course, educating local populations in areas vulnerable to
wildfires about the importance of keeping their environments
intact -- for their own good -- remains the most important effort
that must be taken. Nevertheless, the actions taken over the
weekend by the authorities in Riau deserve to be commended.