---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 15:05:23 +0900
From: James Albert <albert at nms.ac.jp>
To: nia-net at cr-am.rnp.br
Subject: [nia-net] Indonesian Forest Fires
9/29/97
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by JA
The current fires raging in Indonesia are the direct result of decades of
improper land use, as well as from continuing governmental policies. This
huge area of forest is rich in biodiversity, and its destruction will
severely impact the indigenous Dayak communities. The World Commission on
Forests and Sustainable Development reported last month that 15 million
hectares (37 million acres) of tropical forests continue to disappear every
year.
The process is accelerating in Central Kalimantan, where hundreds of
thousands of hectares of pristine tropical peat forests are being replaced
in a huge rice development project, which experts say cannot work. The
million hectare scheme under the direction of President Suharto himself
aims to convert both virgin and logged forests, as well as existing
agricultural sites, into a vast area of irrigated rice-fields, horticulture
and plantations. Indonesian ecologists and economists from the World Bank
agree that the project has no chance for success, as the soil in peat
forests are extremely acidic, and will not support more than a few seasons
of crops. One indication of this project's feasibility is given by the
fact that no international funding organisation will support it.
What we are seeing in the news reports of smog in Singapore and Kuala
Lumpur is an important stage in the long term transformation of Southeast
Asia from a moist reagion of rainforests and peat forests into an area of
agricultural lands and savanahs. The implication of many comentators that
the fires are the result of El Nino are shortsighted. Several regional
climactic fluctuations of this scale and greater have occured since the
Pleistocene, none of which was accompanied by similar widespread
vegetational changes. Transmigrasion, deforestation, and development are
more relevent variables pushing these forests to the flash point.
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE
September 25, 1997-New York Times
"Southeast Asia Chokes as Indonesian Forests Burn
By SETH MYDANS
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- On the bad days, a milky twilight settles over
the city at noon, tall buildings become ghostly shadows and people hurry
along the streets with surgical masks covering their mouths and noses.
Newspapers are filled with instructions: stay indoors, drink plenty of
fluids, wash often, stop smoking, protect your children. There is a
surprising and not-unpleasant whiff of woodsmoke in the sluggish air.
Indeed, vast forest fires are burning out of control. But they are
hundreds of miles away in the jungles of Indonesia, mostly on the islands
of Sumatra and Borneo.
In one of the most widespread man-made disasters the region has known,
smoke from the fires has blanketed a broad swath of Southeast Asia this
month, in an especially severe repeat of what has become a chronic summer
problem over the last few years. This September, a choking haze is dimming
the sun in Singapore, the Philippines, Brunei and southern Thailand as well
as Indonesia and Malaysia.
Flights have been canceled and schools closed around the region, the busy
shipping lanes of the Strait of Malacca have been disrupted by low
visibility, and millions of people are coughing and wheezing. It is
impossible to say just how many people have been made sick by the smoke;
the Indonesian government has traced two deaths directly to it, however.
The fires are mostly intentionally set. Hundreds of Indonesian and
Malaysian companies -- mostly large agricultural concerns -- and some with
high-placed government or military connections, are using fire as a cheap
and illegal means of land-clearing.
What is happening in Southeast Asia is different in kind both from the
smogs of an earlier time in the industrial North and from the forest fires
of North America, which seldom have much impact on big population centers.
In the deliberate burning of rain forest, it resembles the land-clearing
fires that have ravaged large portions of the Amazon, but the pall from
those has affected mostly rural areas.
In Malaysia and Indonesia, by contrast, urban pollution is combining with
smoke from the forest fires and being compounded by yet a third element: El
Nino, the powerful weather-making ocean current that from time to time
upsets weather patterns around the world.
El Nino has returned this year in one of its most intense incarnations of
the 20th century, and one of its early effects has been a drought in
Indonesia that experts expect to spread throughout the region, including
Australia. Some scientists suggest that the dryness has made it more
likely that spontaneously occurring wildfires might be heightening the
misery in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Worst-hit so far is the Malaysian state of Sarawak, in northwestern Borneo,
where a state of emergency has been declared and schools and businesses
have closed as the visibility has shrunk to arm's-length. If the air does
not clear soon, government officials say they may begin evacuating some of
the state's 1.9 million residents.
In urban areas, the haze is a combination of smoke from the fires and
emissions from factories and vehicles that have become an increasing
problem as cities grow in this rapidly developing region.
Even without the wildfires, Kuala Lumpur's air quality has been
deteriorating as it modernizes, like that of other cities in the region
including Bangkok and Jakarta.
Gurmit Singh, who heads an environmental lobbying group here, said the
current disaster is a reminder that unchecked development carries a cost.
"This has been getting worse and worse for more than 10 years, and this is
the worst in memory," said Singh, coughing with what he said was a dry
throat.
The immediate problem is widespread illegal burning of vast tracts of
jungle by agricultural development companies as a cheap way of clearing
land. A secondary problem is created by fires set by slash-and-burn
farmers, who often travel deep into virgin jungle along roads cut by
loggers.
The burning began with the onset of the dry season in June and by August
Indonesia's neighbors began to feel its effects, as they have for the last
half-dozen years.
After the worst previous year, in 1994, Indonesia banned forest burning,
but its new law has been largely ignored. Now both Indonesia and Malaysia
are seeking to identify and prosecute more than 100 companies that are
believed to be the worst offenders.
Once they are started, the fires have proven remarkably difficult to bring
under control, and President Suharto of Indonesia has tendered his "most
sincere apologies" to his neighbors.
An extended dry season caused by the warm ocean currents of the "El Nino"
phenomenon has compounded the problem in several ways. It makes the fires
easier to start and harder to put out, even as it causes an unfolding
famine in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and the neighboring Indonesian
province of Irian Jaya.
And it is delaying the onset -- perhaps for several months -- of the autumn
monsoon rains that are the only sure way of dousing the wildfires. Indeed,
officials say the hot weather is causing new fires in the peat bogs and
barren tracts of logged land in Sumatra and Borneo.
The sustained air pollution here in Malaysia is well beyond the experience
of even the smoggiest cities in the United States, environmental officials
here said.
It is, instead, reminiscent of the soot-laden pea-soup fogs that London
experienced up through the 1950s, when coal-burning was prevalent there.
The worst of the smog seasons in Britain, in 1952, was blamed for 4,000
deaths, and prompted passage of a British Clean Air Act in 1956.
A United States Government scientist familiar with the Malaysian situation
said the smog-like haze there was not quite so deadly as the infamous
killer fog of 1952, but that it nevertheless compared with some of the
worst London fogs of that era. In any case, said the scientist, "this is
very bad."
In the United States, warnings are issued when the Pollution Standard Index
-- a standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency that measures
carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, dust, ash, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen
dioxide -- rises above 100.
Here in Kuala Lumpur, the index has hovered near 200 for weeks and has
approached 300, or "very unhealthy." according to the Malaysian government.
In Sarawak the index climbed to 839 on Tuesday -- far above the
"hazardous" level of 500 at which people are advised to stay inside with
doors and windows closed.
In Singapore the index reached a record level of 226 on Thursday. People
there reported that opera goers inside the air-conditioned Victoria Concert
Hall that night could smell the thick smoke.
"You get a headache and you feel very sleepy in class," said Khavita Kaur,
a Malaysian high school student who wore a surgical mask below her white
Islamic head scarf. "And you can smell the smoke when you breathe, and
your eyes smart."
Indonesian television today quoted experts as saying that breathing the
haze in badly affected areas was as dangerous as smoking 80 cigarettes a
day.
The persistent smog has begun to take a political toll here in a country
already battered by an economic downturn. Reports about the haze have
overshadowed newspaper accounts of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's
denunciations of Western currency traders last week.
"Angered and distressed by the worsening haze, Malaysians want the
government to come out with more effective measures," the daily newspaper
Star said last week, though it offered no suggestions.
And in an unusual public protest, 100 demonstrators marched in a central
square of the capital on Sunday, chanting, "Immediate action! Immediate
action!"
On the same day, Mahathir announced that he was sending 1,200 firefighters
to Indonesia to help battle the wildfires. And for local relief, the
government said it is studying plans to spray water from the tops of
buildings to cut the haze.
For many people here, none of these measures is enough; their impulse is
to flee. Shazman, a waiter who like many Malaysians uses only one name,
said he had sent his two small children away from the smoggy city to live
with their grandparents.
And on weekends, like other people here, he said he escapes to the beach.
But he conceded that this relief was an illusion. The beaches are smoggy
too.
* * * * *
Indonesian bush fires spewing smoke across Southeast Asia threaten a major
ecological disaster in one of the world's richest regions for wildlife,
experts said on Friday. Some 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of land
has gone up in smoke on the huge islands of Borneo and Sumatra as a result
of fires.
``It kills insects,'' said Ron Lilley of the World Wildlife Fund in
Jakarta. ``Once you lose the insects, you lose the birds and the reptiles
which live on them, and the food chain is affected all the way up,'' he
said. Part of the problem was a dearth of information on what was
happening in the sprawling Indonesian archipelago. Some places are as
remote as it is possible to get, and it may be years before the full
effects are known.
``The sad thing is we may never know what we have lost. The species lists
from everywhere in Indonesia are never complete,'' Lilley said. Few
studies have been done in the region on the effects of widespread fires.
The current fires are believed to be the worst ever, and experts said the
effects would certainly surmount anything in the past.
``We've heard stories of orang-utan being driven out of the forest and into
conflict with villagers,'' Lilley said. ``We've no confirmation, but it's
worrying. If there's conflict, the orang-utan always lose out.''
Elephants, tigers, and all kinds of deer were potentially at risk, but
primates, which teem in the Indonesian jungles, were perhaps the most
vulnerable of the large animals, Roy said.
``Four-footed animals can move fast and escape the flames. Primates are
not as fast -- and they need trees to move through,'' he added. Even if
their habitats are spared the flames, the smoke will have far-reaching
effects. It cuts down the light, which cuts down the photosynthesis that
drives plant growth. Deposits of chemicals in large enough quantities can
kill plants.With insects dying off, amphibians will suffer in a dry season
made worse by drought. They said birds were already suffering, dying in
hundreds and perhaps thousands. And when the rains do return, they might
just spread the disaster far out to sea, Lilley said.
In addition to the widespread damage to terrestrial ecosystems the fires
could, ultimately, have a devastating impact on coral islands.
``With no plant cover, the run-off will add considerably to the sediment
loads of rivers. We know sedimentation can be carried far out to sea and
the effects can be very dramatic. It could reach the coral reefs,'' he
said. ``The sediment cuts down the light, which is vital for coral. It
settles on the coral and kills it. The coral crumbles and the islands wash
away.''
James Albert
Department of Anatomy
Nippon Medical School
Tokyo, Japan