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.