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Smoke and Mirrors Obscure the Smoking Gun BehindForest FiresBy Erik Meijaard on 03:52 pm Jun 05, 2014Category Commentary, OpinionTags: environment, Forest fires, Indonesian haze

With a 70 percent chance of El Nino occurring this year, Indonesia could soon be facing the ire of its nearest neighbors yet againas the dry season approaches with the ever present threat of vegetation fires.

Smoke, haze, call it what you will, it’s an annual event affecting people and the environment both at home and abroad.Newsworthy but nothing new in this story, in fact it’s deja vu or even a recurring nightmare. An Indonesian newspaper headlinefrom October 1994: “Political will needed to prevent forest fires.” Twenty years later, just last week: “Singapore braces for worst‘haze’ season as Indonesia fails to halt slash-and-burn.” The issue of land and forest fires in Indonesia is evidently an old one.Trust me, it won’t go away any time soon.

Fires come in waves. Sometimes they are small, sometimes bigger, depending on how dry it gets. But each wave is followed byinternational outcry, national media attention, government commitment to do something about those damn fires, new donormoney to help government, a bunch of fresh fire projects promising solutions, and ultimately endless broken promises.

Then it starts to rain. Fires die out. The heat is off the government. Projects close down. Donors look for the next environmentalposter child. And we all forget what it was like.

The bottom line is that many people here burn, it’s a basic human instinct, an artefact from our early beginnings, and people willkeep on burning until the costs of burning outweigh the benefits.

Burning happens everywhere. People habitually burn household rubbish and piles of swept leaves in the Jakarta suburbs where Ilive; it’s a great way to get rid of stuff. The smoke doesn’t seem to bother anyone, or if I ask, people tell me it keeps mosquitoesaway. The fact that we are breathing dioxins from burning plastic seems to bother few, if any.

Outside Jakarta, and pretty much in any rice-growing part of Indonesia, there is annual burning of rice-field stubble. When I livedamong Bali’s sawas, I was surprised how often our house filled up with thick smoke. Again, no one seemed to mind, apart fromme, of course.

And the same happens in Indonesia’s forests, where people have cultivated land through slash-and-burn agriculture for manycenturies. As a low intensity land use, this works quite well; you chop down a bit of forest, burn it, use the ashes to increase soilfertility, grow crops for a few years and let the trees grow back.

Thus, fire is an integral part of Indonesia’s cleaning schedule. It removes stuff you don’t want, and the smoke has someadditional healing benefits; smoke and fire are good. Just like kretek cigarettes were once promoted for treating tuberculosis.

The point is that fires will not go away easily. People will only stop if the cost of burning gets too high. That could be because

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there are serious fines for burning. It could also be because there is nothing of low value left to burn, for example, when all landis covered bypermanent crops that are worth more standing than burned down.

The national law No. 18/ 2004 states that anyone who clears land by burning is threatened with imprisonment of 10 years and afine of up to Rp 10 billion ($860,000). Obviously, despite continuous burning, millions of arsonists don’t inhabit Indonesia’sprisons, and neither have they paid some $10 trillion in fines to the country’s coffers. The government would be a heck of a lotricher if they had.

Still, law enforcement has worked. I have been flying over Indonesia for many years. It used to be par for the course to see majorfires on lands that were being “opened up” for plantations. This is now much rarer. The last one I saw was a few months ago, justoutside Pontianak, where an oil palm plantation was clearly burning down scrub ahead of planting.

It took me by surprise, and I was unfortunately not quick enough to grab my phone to take some pictures.

Because the use of fire is apparently so fundamental to the human psyche, solutions won’t be easily found. A helpful start wouldbe to zone the country into strict no-burning areas, and other areas where occasional use of fire is allowed. Peat swamps shouldbe in the former zone, because fires there are among the most damaging, with irreversible impacts. Strictly enforcing a no-burning policy on peat by handing out stiff fines and jail sentences to any person or company involved in burning, would be veryeffective in stopping fires in these areas.

Elsewhere, it is more about education. What alternatives exist for burning household rubbish? Are there good ways to preparerice fields for next year’s planting without the use of fire? Finally, secure tenure and land rights would help hugely. It is mucheasier to burn something if it doesn’t strictly belong to you.

As I am writing this, I am in my car on the way to Bandung. It’s nearly 7 a.m., a weak sun shines through the smog and smoke-filled sky, reminding me that Indonesia has a long way to go. If only those dry season winds would blow south and stay withinnational boundaries rather than north, then no one would complain, and Indonesia wouldn’t find itself in the international spotlightagain.

Indonesia should brace itself for another smoky year. If that’s a concern to the country, the annual empty talk about solving theproblem and palliative measures should stop and some decisive action should be taken to reverse the recurring fire issue. But fornow, it’s just smoke on the waters.

Erik Meijaard runs the Borneo Futures — Science for Change program from Jakarta.

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