The fog of government rhetoric and corporate environmental shenanigans
This probably goes without saying, but the haze sucks. On Saturday, I swear I could smell the fires of Sumatra burning. People have to live their lives, and so I was out and about all weekend when the haze was really bad, and now have been on sick leave for 2 days with tonsillitis. (great excuse to watch half the first season of Desperate Housewives in one sitting, I know, but that’s besides the point.)
Anyway, it’s getting a bit old to keep hearing the Indonesian government make the same lame excuses for why the haze keeps coming back year after year. They keep blaming “farmers and plantation owners” without ever giving specifics. These are not just anonymous little guys going around doing their nomadic agricultural stuff. It’s gotta take a whole lot more slashing-and-burning to cause the kind of environmental phenomenon we are seeing now. A 1998 International Development Research Centre (IDRC) report estimated that at that time (when the haze was the worst it’s ever been in Southeast Asia), “about 80% of the burning in 1997 was caused by large firms and 20% by traditional slash-and-burn farmers”.
I doubt the situation has changed much in the last 9 years. In fact, on October 5, 2006, Greenpeace Southeast Asia activists protested in front of Jakarta’s Ministry of Forestry and revealed that “During our investigations last month, we discovered that big industrial concessionaires, more than small farmers, were responsible for these forest fires”.
And therein lies the explanation for why the haze problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Agricultural practices are difficult to regulate, evidence of large companies engaging in these illegal practices is almost impossible to collect much less ensure their admissibility in court, and corporations can simply get around the law by hiring others to do the burning for them in order to escape persecution.
To this day, not a single individual or corporation has been charged with illegal forest burning in Indonesia. I believe there is no political will on the part of the Indonesian government to do this, because it could signal a potential fall-out in Indonesia’s desirability to large corporations as an agricultural hub (read: cheap land and labour, big profits) in a region ripe with competition.
On a side note, the Singapore government has been offering to help by providing cloud-seeding technology, which expands already-existing clouds in order to increase the probability of rain. Which makes me wonder about the unseasonably rainy weather we had during the IMF/World Bank meetings. Conspiracy theory? Perhaps. But never underestimate the power of a paranoid government with vested interests.
Anyway, it’s getting a bit old to keep hearing the Indonesian government make the same lame excuses for why the haze keeps coming back year after year. They keep blaming “farmers and plantation owners” without ever giving specifics. These are not just anonymous little guys going around doing their nomadic agricultural stuff. It’s gotta take a whole lot more slashing-and-burning to cause the kind of environmental phenomenon we are seeing now. A 1998 International Development Research Centre (IDRC) report estimated that at that time (when the haze was the worst it’s ever been in Southeast Asia), “about 80% of the burning in 1997 was caused by large firms and 20% by traditional slash-and-burn farmers”.
I doubt the situation has changed much in the last 9 years. In fact, on October 5, 2006, Greenpeace Southeast Asia activists protested in front of Jakarta’s Ministry of Forestry and revealed that “During our investigations last month, we discovered that big industrial concessionaires, more than small farmers, were responsible for these forest fires”.
And therein lies the explanation for why the haze problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Agricultural practices are difficult to regulate, evidence of large companies engaging in these illegal practices is almost impossible to collect much less ensure their admissibility in court, and corporations can simply get around the law by hiring others to do the burning for them in order to escape persecution.
To this day, not a single individual or corporation has been charged with illegal forest burning in Indonesia. I believe there is no political will on the part of the Indonesian government to do this, because it could signal a potential fall-out in Indonesia’s desirability to large corporations as an agricultural hub (read: cheap land and labour, big profits) in a region ripe with competition.
On a side note, the Singapore government has been offering to help by providing cloud-seeding technology, which expands already-existing clouds in order to increase the probability of rain. Which makes me wonder about the unseasonably rainy weather we had during the IMF/World Bank meetings. Conspiracy theory? Perhaps. But never underestimate the power of a paranoid government with vested interests.
posted by burgers and durians at
10:47 PM
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