This is a good article by Forbes on the forest fires. It really shows how powerless the PAP is. Many of the fires are apparently peat moss fires which are very hard to extinguish.
Indonesia's Forest Fires Choke Malaysia, Singapore: 'Burning Land....Just for Fun'
Planes can’t land, schools are closed, states of emergency imposed and the Indonesian President Joko Widodo makes a surprise visit to still-smoking South Sumatra. This is the new normal for Southeast Asian summers — choking haze from Indonesian forest fires. Unlike past years, the pall hardly makes a headline in the Hong Kong press. For Singaporeans, Malaysian and Indonesians the inconvenience and ill health are something they have to live with. This year is no exception. The Singapore government has a special website.
Indonesia said Friday (Sept. 11) that it would send 10,000 troops to fight the fires in Sumatra. Singapore’s defense minister the same day said that Indonesia has accepted his country’s offer to provide military aircraft to fight forest fires. Even that offer was shrouded in the smoky air: Indonesian media quoted government officials as saying Indonesia didn’t need any help.
The forest fires are set partly to clear land for palm oil plantations. Innovative efforts are going into tracking down the culprits, who in the past were able to get away with burning forest land for plantations because of the difficulty of figuring exactly what was going on in locations that are far from Jakarta.
Washington, D.C.-based environmental group World Resources Institute (WRI) is using satellites and computers to identify the sites of fire down to one square kilometer in size. Here is a link to WRI’s forest-fire tracking site and WRI’s latest blog on the subject.
The Economist opines that “everybody knows” the forest fires are just set to clear land for plantations, but the picture on the ground is hazier than that. Although almost half of the forest fires take place in large plantation holders’ concessions, conservationist Erik Meijaard argues that the focus on large plantation-holders misses the point. Given that a majority of burning is taking place outside of large concession-holders’ boundaries, sometimes “just for fun,” he says that the government needs to get serious about fire prohibitions and take the total costs of development (whether slash-and-burn agriculture or development of coastal peatlands) into account.
“The key point is that the fire and haze problem in Indonesia is complex, with multiple actors playing a role. Focusing on large concessions alone, which the Indonesian government and also non-government organizations seem to do, is not going to do much to reduce the problem,” writes Meijaard. “Anyone who has ever spent time in Kalimantan or Sumatra during the dry season knows that burning land for agriculture, for hunting, or just for fun is a favorite pastime of many.”
Indonesia still has not ratified the ASEAN trans-boundary haze treaty, though it was signed 12 years ago in the wake of serious fires in 1997 and 1998. The Jakarta Post says that Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa is deflecting blame for the fires, talking about consensus and cooperation with neighbors while Indonesia has been unable to control the repeated fire outbreaks.
This note from a friend who owns a palm oil plantation and has taken numerous measures to implement sustainable palm oil cultivation – details some of the problems.
The palm plantation owner writes:
“What is causing the fires burning on degraded peat forest and unproductive scrubland in the province of Riau, Sumatra? These are the fires that create the haze affecting Singapore, Malaysia and the province of Riau itself.
From my own experience, I can identify several causes of these annually occurring fires each dry season.
• Contractors of palm oil companies who accidentally start fires that quickly get out of control unless management immediately intervenes
• Small holders practicing slash and burn as a cheap way to clear land for planting intentionally burn their own land
• Large plantations with poor Environmental, Health and Safety practices have thousands of employees who may behave in unsafe ways like tossing cigarette butts into dry scrub
Once a fire begins on peat soil it is difficult control.
Solution
How can we avoid these recurring and large scale fires? One way is to
1. Establish a permanent organization that has a work program, budget and the authority to act on behalf of the provincial and central governments
2. This organization would have stakeholder meetings of community leaders, provincial government and businesses to jointly take preemptive measures before every dry season begins
Challenge : Why isn’t this being done?
The provincial government hasn’t got the manpower, equipment or budget to deal with this issue.
The central government is distracted – with what is sees – as “national” issues such as:
• efforts to reduce the systemic corruption
• agricultural policies that have failed to address food security and rising prices of basic staples such as beef, soy bean.
• infrastructure development that has failed to keep pace with requirements for more manufactured exports
• wage confrontation between labor and business
• The common elements required to resolve these challenges are: good policy, strong enforcement and political will power. At this stage, Indonesia’s dysfunctional government is going to focus on the 5 challenges I just mentioned. Not on the haze. So realistically, I think the problem will continue. But…
• Positive: Increasing numbers of the large, established palm oil companies are becoming members of RSPO (Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil). Annual audits ensure certification is maintained. There is premium for RSPO certified oil palm – that’s the incentive for doing it. Our own company has its product RSPO certified.
• Notes: The haze and the fires that cause them affect mainly one province out of 33 and is seasonal. The other significant challenges I mention earlier affect the whole nation constantly.”
My summary: the issue of Indonesia’s forest fires, a local problem that has global consequences because of the impact on carbon emissions, needs to be approached both from a bottom-up and a top-down perspective. International NGOs are having an impact by putting pressure on companies such as Unilever and Nestle . WRI’s science-based surveillance will help on-the-ground efforts. Unfortunately, work on the ground in Indonesia is not easy. In a culture where people set fires for food, for money, for hunting and just for fun, it’s hard to change behavior. Indonesia needs regional and local political leadership to simultaneously adopt a zero-tolerance policy to forest fires while at the same time providing more — and more sustainable — economic opportunities.
This is easier said than done. In 2010, Norway promised to provide Indonesian $1 billion to help make this transition to sustainable forestry and agriculture under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program, but the program failed to meet many of its goals, as this post from the Center of Global Development highlights.
The situation looks like it’s getting worse, at least in parts of Borneo, as we move into mid-September. Malaysia’s Star reported on Sept. 11 that the haze in part of Borneo is so bad that satellite images cannot see fire hotspots. The Star quoted Malaysia’s Natural Resources and Environment Minister Dr Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafa a estimating that “four-fifths” of the Indonesian part of Borneo was “under a cloud of smoke”. The paper also quoted the minister as saying that the Malysian portion of the island did not show any evidence of hotspots. Meanwhile, click through to the Borneo Post’s pictures to get a sense of what it’s like to be breathing the “haze”: They make the air in this picture below, of Singapore, look by comparison not quite as bad.
Note: I’m writing this update, on Sept. 15, from Seoul, South Korea. Watching from a distance as the forest fires continue raging through mid-September, as people are dying, I’m struck by Indonesia’s inability to get the situation under control.
President Joko Widjodo made a surprise visit to Sumatra Sept. 6 and has taken personal responsibility for ending the blazes. The situation appears to have worsened since his visit. Yet Indonesia has turned down Singapore’s offer of help and Indonesian Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Baka says it will take up to 3 weeks to put out the fires.
Scientist Henry Purnomo of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) says forest fires are the worst since 1997. Indonesia endured serious fires again in 2013. The message is that the Indonesian government is unwilling or unable to take meaningful steps to solve this problem. Henry notes that it costs $7 a hectare to clear land by burning versus $150 for mechanized clearing, so there’s no short-term economic argument that would suggest burning can be stopped.
Yes, it is tough to know who is responsible for the fires. Paper and pulp companies like giant Asia Pulp and Paper say that the fires are a problem for them, too.
What’s clear is that the current approach isn’t working. We’re two decades into a cycle of serious fires.These fires are killing people. The blazes are destroying forests that are the lungs of the world. The fires are exposing Indonesia’s lack of effective governance. They are showing how even the wealthiest city-states are not really islands — even one as competent as Singapore, which has proven itself largely powerless to protect its own citizens’ health against its neighbor’s forest fires. It is time to get serious with solutions that are bottom-up as well as top-down. We can’t afford to wait another two decades for real action.
Mark Clifford is the author of The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency (Columbia University Press 2015).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mcliffo...malaysia-singapore-burning-land-just-for-fun/
