Persistent fires and prevailing winds ;carried smoke beyond Indonesian shores — blanketing the region with haze and raising health and other concerns in neigbouring Singapore and MaIaysia.

Indonesia’s more than 140 million ha of forest are the second-largest in ~the world after Brazil.

A prolonged dry spell throughout the country since May this year had made forest and other parched areas particularly susceptible to fires —which were started by human activity as well as natural causes.

Much of the blame has been put on two types of farmers: nomads who traditionally shift from one remote area to the next, and settled farmers.

Both groups make use of the dry season to clear and nourish the land through a practice known commonly as  "slash and burn" — and have continued to do so despite education programmes aimed at getting them to change their habits.

This is because limited funds and manpower have meant that the government programmes, when carried out, can at best reach only farmers operating in areas close to centres of ‘population.

Those who live in remote areas, where roads are had or non-existent and river-rides arc long and arduous, do not know any better about the dangers of their practice, let alone that its effects are felt well beyond the confines of their clearings.

Government efforts to encourage ~settlement agriculture in place of shifting cultivation — and its attendant slash-and-burn approach to land clearing — have also not been entirely successfu1.

This is because much has to depend ‘on funding and the government’s ability to provide farmers with tools, seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and the know-how to use these.

While not all farmers have been ~‘brought in to participate in such programmes, those who have, like Mr Suparlan of East Kalimantan, lament  that there has been little follow-up action by the authorities.

He said he was also discouraged in his efforts to consider planting long-term crops like pepper and palmyra. When he tried applying for loans from a government bank to fund ~an irrigation scheme, he was turned down.

"I cannot afford to buy fertiliser,", said the farmer who has lived in the outskirts of Balikpapan since 1961.

"So I burn the land, It makes it ~more fertile."

Burning land to clear fallen branches, leaves, discarded tree stumps and other debris left in the wake of logging operations is also a practice used by plantation owners, transmigratory settlers and forestry concession holders.

It is considered cheap, efficient and fast. And for the farmers, it is the only method they know.

A relatively new group, which has taken a similar approach to clearing land, are urban dwellers racing to acquire land in or near forested areas, as has been the case in central Kalimantan over the past two years.

Drawn by the belief that land prices will soar with development and the expansion of townships — and encouraged by local authorities to clear land if they want to register their claim to it— these urbanites hire farmers or others to clear their 5,000-sq-m plots for as little as Rp 100,000 (S$600) a plot.

New measures

INDONESIAN officials, not least among them Environment Minister Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, say that burning to clear the land is not only inefficient, but also damaging.

As is evident now, millions of beet-ares of forestry resources and other areas have fallen victim to this process.

Mr Sarwono, who discussed the issue of fires and preventive measures with Singapore Environment Minister Mah Bow Tan last week, has indicated that a mixture of education, incentives and enforcement would have to be applied to deal with the problem.

The mindset of those who do not know any better than to clear land by burning because it is cheap and efficient, has to be changed gradually.

Rather than burn the felled trees, discarded wood and debris, these should be gathered and sold to companies which can turn them into wood chips. Alternatively, debris can be turned into compost in a matter of months.

Firms which have licences to log forest areas and large plantations have now been notified to prepare infrastructure, equipment and personnel to tackle fires when these occur on their sites.

Forestry Minister Djamaludin Suryohadikusumo said earlier this month that the responsibility for handling fires on such sites rests with forestry concession licence-holders and plantation owners. They should act without having to wait for instructions or assistance from the government.

Wood debris left behind from logging activity contributes to the spread of fires from one area to another. So too do roads built to support logging activity.

Roads have given farmers and others easier access into forest areas where they can carry out the "slash-and-burn" practice. They also raise the possibility of fires being started by cigarettes flicked carelessly out of passing cars or bus windows.

The ease with which that can occur was very evident to the Sunday Review team in parts of Kalimantan where the blackened remains of burnt shrubbery stretched for kilometre after kilometre along the main highways connecting Kalimantan’s larger towns.

ADDING to the forest and bush fire woes in Indonesia is the fact that large tracts of East Kalimantan, including those around the Bukit Soeharto forest reserve, have coal deposits beneath the surface.

Environmentalists say excessive logging and erosion has stripped the land bare and exposed these coal deposits, which ignite easily when subjected to the heat of direct sunlight.

Coal deposits here and elsewhere in the eastern part of Kalimantan have also been smouldering underground since the Big One of 1982, when fire scorched a total of 3.7 million ha of forest.

Said Mr Gazali Abas, who heads the Mahakam district forest supervision office in east Kalimantan, which oversees Bukit Soeharto: "There are peat fields dry out in the drought and often combust spontaneously in the heat.

On both counts — coal and peat —the government is moving to interest investors to either extract coal, or turn peat fields into arable land, or use peat as a source of energy to run power stations.

These measures, according to Mr Sarwono, can provide solutions over the longer term to both coal and peat becoming fuel for the fires.

Up until last week, when a series of concrete measures to tackle the annual occurrence of forest, peat and coal fires were announced — including a central agency to coordinate efforts —environmental groups had felt the authorities’ reaction had been far from effective.

The government had been accused of lacking the political will to act, being too proud to seek assistance from abroad, and taking a lackadaisical attitude towards the annual tires saying that the rains would come to extinguish the fires.

Officials defend their attitude, arguing that it is difficult to defeat nature, but pledging to take preventive action in the coming months so as to minimise a recurrence of the situation next year.

Environmentalists here have also been critical of the recent transfer of Rp 400 billion from the government’s reforestation fund to the state-run IPTN aircraft manufacturer t~r its N-250 commuter plane project.

Ms Emmy Hafild, programme coordinator for Walhi. the Indonesian Environmental Forum, has argued that forestry officials at the ground level are short of equipment and the funds ought to have gone towards fulfilling their needs.

The transfer of the funds is now being challenged by environmental groups in court.

There have also been accusations that attention often tends to focus on fires in the Bukit Soeharto reserve because it is a prestigious project the government has used to highlight Indonesia’s concern and commitment to issues like reforestation and conservation.

Officials acknowledge that the fires have highlighted the country’s forest management woes, its difficulty in controlling logging and other practices. and the shortcomings in anticipating and preventing fires.

But things appear to be changing.

"When Indonesia began exploiting the forests in the early ‘70s, we had little knowledge or information about our natural resources and did little to protect them," said Mr Soeyitno Soedirman, senior researcher at Mulawarman University’s forestry faculty in Samarinda, East Kalimantan.

"Only since the late ‘80s did we start to tighten logging practices and train people to protect the forest."

The way to go

He said there appeared to be a greater awareness by timber firms, at least, about the dangers of leaving an area without cleaning up waste wood and branches that could burn quickly during the dry season.

Unlike in the past, when many logging firms got away from rules which required them to replant their areas, this obligation to reforest an area is being enforced more seriously by the government recently.

The problem, some officials argue, lies not with main concession holders but with firms which have had work sub-contracted out to them — and which cut corners to get the work done.

Environmentalists and analysts like Mr Baselman Hamun, head of the state-run Palangkaraya University’s community service department, believe that the prevalence of logging has robbed government of what would have been a strong ally in the forest area — the farmer.

"The fact that much of the forest areas have been allocated to logging firms to exploit had left a perception among traditional farmers that forestry protection is no longer their concern," Mr Baselman said.

"As a result, they no longer have the same sense of responsibility that they used to have. When they see fires spread from their land to forest areas. they tend to ignore them."

This bears out what Mr Sarwono said was the attitude and tendency among those who work the land to dismiss tires as an insignificant problem — something that happens to other people.

"So you have to be the victim of a major fire yourself in order to be more careful about fires in future."

Source : The Sunday Times, Oct 23, 1994

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