More fires, hot spots on Kalimantan
Abdul Khalik, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Forest fires and hot spots were spreading at an alarming rate across Indonesian Borneo, at a rate of over a hundred a day over the last week, a senior official from the Office of the State Ministry of Environment said on Sunday.
"The latest report on Saturday from our staff in West, Central and East Kalimantan says that the hot spots have reached 400 while on Thursday and Friday hot spots were only 200 and 300 respectively," the Deputy Minister for Ecosystem Maintenance Sudariyono told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.
He added that the quick spread of fires was caused by strong winds in some areas, which pushed the fires to the east from West Kalimantan to the forested areas of Central Kalimantan and East Kalimantan.
Sudariyono said that local ministry officials together with local plantation and forest agencies had been trying to stem the spread of the fires.
"However, we have not been very successful because we don't have enough personnel to cover such a wide area," he said.
He said his office had received reports that parts of West, Central and East Kalimantan, were blanketed by smoky haze.
He added that the haze could be thicker because land-clearing by setting forest fires continued.
"Luckily, the strong winds have pushed the fires and smoke to the eastern part of the island. Which means that it should not have affected neighboring countries, such as Malaysia and Singapore," said Sudariyono.
In contrast, he said, the conditions on Sumatra had been improving thanks to the recent rain there.
The haze reached dangerous levels in June when thick smoke blanketed most of western Borneo, Sumatra, Singapore and Malaysia. The worst haze occurred in 1997, and to a lesser extend in 1998 when it enveloped parts of Southeast Asia for months, causing serious health problems and traffic hazards.
Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have each blamed each other for the haze. Talks on the issue have come up in the meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian countries but there has been no significant improvement.
Vice President Hamzah Haz has said the haze problem "was to be expected" given the involvement of Singapore and Malaysia in illegal logging businesses. The two countries have repeatedly denied that they buy illegal logs from Indonesia.
Last Sunday, Malaysian Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Adenan Satem said that he believed that there was large-scale slash-and-burn farming on Sumatra and the Indonesian parts of Borneo in contrast to a few fires in Sarawak, Malaysia on the northern third of Borneo.
Sudariyono said the condition could worsen as the fires had hit the peat moss areas in Central and East Kalimantan while people in those areas continued to burn the forest to make way for plantations.
"The fires in wet areas (like peat moss) will cause heavy smoke. And it will make it much more difficult to extinguish them, especially because the rain is not expected until late September," he said.
To make the problem worse, Sudariyono said, several companies had been involved in torching the forests for their plantations as it was the cheapest way to clear land. He did not mention the names of the companies.