Indonesia is finally acting to contain a thick haze blanketing the region following complaints from its neighbours.
Officials from Malaysia and Singapore this week called on Jakarta to deal with the sources of the smoke and offered to help with the effort. The two countries have been affected by smoke drifting across from Sumatra.
“We have our own system, the BNPB [National Agency for Disaster Management], to deal with forest fires,” the deputy minister for environmental damage control, Arief Yuwono, said on Friday.
“It will be handled by the provincial government but if it’s too big then we will declare a national emergency.”
He spoke soon after Environment Minister Gusti Muhammad Hatta said Forestry Ministry firefighters were already in Riau working with local communities to put out the fires.
“The fires have been occurring in Bengkalis district in Riau province and if we look at the map, it is close to Singapore,” Gusti said in answer to complaints from Singapore that smoke from Indonesia had covered the island republic in a thick haze.
Indonesian television showed a wall of gray smoke rising from plantations and forests in Sumatra, while the city of Pekanbaru, the capital of Riau, was choked with haze.
Arief claimed the sources of the fires had not yet been determined.
“We will conduct a thorough investigation into this because if it’s occurring outside forest areas then we will take legal moves,” he said.
However, it is generally believed most of the fires are the result of the outlawed practice of land clearing by burning.
Under the 2009 Law on Environmental Management and Protection, using fires to clear land is prohibited.
Despite of the law, weak enforcement in the face of a lack of funding and personnel has led to the continuing use of the practice by farmers preparing land for new crops or large plantations opening or clearing land.
The smoke could also come from burning or smoldering peat bogs, which abound in Sumatra and are hard to douse, or from burning subterranean coal seams.
Forest and ground fires are common during the dry season in Indonesia or toward the end of the season as farmers and planters begin to prepare new crops for the rainy season.
Marzuki, the chief analyst at the Pekanbaru meteorology office, said the hot spots, areas of high temperatures detected by satellite imaging, were centered in the Riau districts of Rokan Hilir, Bengkalis and Dumai.
It was smoke from these fires, he said, that was being swept by winds toward Malaysia and Singapore.
“The wind is moving at between 7 and 25 kilometers per hour from south to the north, causing smoke to fill Sumatra’s atmosphere,” he added.
Gusti said his Singaporean counterpart, Yaacob Ibrahim, had offered assistance in dealing with the fires during a phone conversation on Thursday.
Malaysia’s natural resources and environment minister, Douglas Uggah Embas, said he had also written to urge his Indonesian counterpart “to take appropriate action to mitigate the problem” and to offer help to put out the fires.
But the government has not always accepted the assistance.
Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said he had told his Singaporean counterpart, George Yeo, that haze was a “transboundary challenge” and that countries in the region “should be working hand in hand to address the particular challenge.”
Yeo said the haze was causing a significant increase in health problems.
“Minister Yeo informed Minister Marty that the PSI went over 100 yesterday and cases of respiratory problems including asthma had increased significantly,” the Foreign Ministry said.
A reading above 100 on Singapore’s PSI, or pollution standards index, is considered unhealthy.
Marty said Indonesia had not had a major haze problem in the past four years.
“The effort the Indonesian government has undertaken during that time has worked,” he said.
Noor Hidayat, director of forest control at the Forestry Ministry, said: “We have done our best to minimize the forest fires in those areas. But the law enforcement is weak.
“I think the law enforcement apparatus must work harder and tougher and crack down on the people who did this. Shock therapy is needed here.”
Massive forest and ground fires in Sumatra and Borneo, compounded by the El Nino weather phenomenon, cast a choking haze over the region in 1997-98, causing health and traffic hazards in several countries.
