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From: yfyap@pop.jaring.my (Yap Yok Foo)
To: sangkancil@malaysia.net
Subject: [sangkancil] Deadly smog returns to threaten Asia
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 02:51:40 GMT
Organization: Private
Reply-to: yfyap@pop.jaring.my (Yap Yok Foo)
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>From The Independent, UK
9th Feb 1998
Borneo's forests burn on the bonfire of big business
Forest burning in Indonesia is no accident: nearly all the fires are
man made. The real culprits are the huge industrial conglomerates
which have encouraged the development of the rainforests. Richard
Lloyd Parry reports from East Kalimantan.
The strangest thing about the jungle near Muara Nayan, stranger than
the smell of the air and the blank whiteness of the sky, is how
autumnal it looks, closer to Hyde Park in October than the tropics.
The smell is one of autumn bonfires and the tall trees are bare of
leaves, or shedding them onto the road in orange piles.
But we are just 40 miles from the equator, and the temperature here is
close to 38C. These are tropical hardwoods, not elms and sycamores,
and we are in the forests of Borneo, eight hours from the nearest
city, where it is hot and humid all the year round and there are no
seasons.
The puzzle is answered a few yards off the dusty road, in what used to
be a swampy grove of hardwoods and fruit trees. Now, for a few hundred
yards on all sides, it is the skeleton of a forest - the swamp water
has thickened to viscous mud, scattered with the fallen bodies of
blackened trees and covered in a layer of white ash.
Even from the unburned vegetation lines of smoke rise into a dazzling
white sky in which the sun is visible only as a pale orange disc. In
an area the size of a football pitch, there are no insects or birds,
no frogs or snakes, and no monkeys.
The Dayak tribesman who used to tend this land is at a loss. "It began
three weeks ago in the middle of the night," he says, "and the first
we knew was the smoke the next morning.
"We came quickly, but the fire had spread so far, and there is no
water. So we had to let it burn." His durian trees, his mangoes,
jackfruit and rambutans were all destroyed. "Every year, there were
fruit there, for my family to eat and to sell in the market. I have
lost my income, my livelihood."
In a normal year, he could rely on his rice fields - but with almost
no rain since last year, the harvest is doomed to be a failure. His
family have taken to weaving traditional textiles and making Dayak
wood carvings - but the foreign tourists who might have bought them
have been scared away by news of the enveloping smoke.
A worse and bigger fire three months ago burned several years' worth
of rattan, the pliable cane which is the other local standby. But if
this looks like a natural disaster, the villagers do not see it that
way. "There is no proof," says the village headman, "and it is
possible that some of these are accidents. But in the past, even when
it was as dry, there were never so many fires as this. They have begun
only after the companies came in, the companies and their politics.
But we cannot prove it, so we keep silent."
Borneo is burning again. In November and December, the rains came at
last, bringing respite from the fires which burned all summer, closing
airports, causing deadly shipping and aviation accidents, and choking
millions of people in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand with the
so-called "haze".
But in East Kalimantan, the biggest province of Indonesian Borneo, it
has rained for no more than a few hours since the beginning of the
year, at what is supposed to be the height of the wet season.
Helicopter inspections last week revealed fires covering some
15-20,000 hectares in this province alone, and with no rains in sight
the situation can only get worse. Indonesia, home of some of the
world's biggest tropical rain forests, is once again on the way to
becoming its biggest bonfire. But if the effects of the blaze are
obvious enough, its causes are as complex and murky as Indonesia's
politics, a product of greed, social engineering and the interaction
of modern industry with a traditional way of life which has existed
peacefully here for centuries.
If there is one thing which everyone agrees on, it is that almost all
the fires burning here are man-made, the result of deliberate burning
rather than accidents with cigarette ends or spontaneous combustion.
For centuries, fire has been an essential tool of the slash-and-burn
agriculture of the Dayak tribes who still populate Borneo's interior,
as well as the "transmigrants", more recent arrivals, freighted in by
the government in a controversial programme to ease congestion in
poorer, more arid islands.
The former have lived here for thousands of years and their experience
of the forest is enshrined in a detailed set of traditional precepts
and religious rituals governing the use of fire. The latter, who often
come to farming with no previous experience, lack this expertise. "The
Dayak people don't cause forest fires," says Ludwig Schindler, a
German expert who heads the Integrated Forest Fire Management (IFFM)
project in the East Kalimantan capital, Samarinda.
"They know when it's too dry and dangerous to burn. But the outsiders
don't have the close relationship with the forest, and they're
careless. A man might want to clear half a hectare for himself and end
up burning 200."
But the third and crucial element of the problem is the hundreds of
commercial companies - rubber and palm oil planters, extractors of
timber, gold and coal - who have descended on Borneo since the late
1960s, hacking and exporting its rainforests, which can be found in
their virgin state only in the deep interior and in a few reserves.
For these companies, just as for the small farmers, burning is the
quickest way of clearing forest, both in order to clear land earmarked
for mining or planting, and to convert logged land for agricultural
use.
The presence of these companies has created wounding rifts, as
damaging to the local culture as they are to the environment. Many of
the companies are affiliated to massive Indonesian conglomerates, run
by the immediate family and cronies of President Suharto. Granted
licenses by the central government, they arrive to "negotiate" with
the local people who have almost no legal rights to their land,
despite their ancient history.
Dayaks in Lempunah, a village near Muara Nayan, have been offered lump
sums to exchange their traditional land for a small share in a palm
oil plantation. So far they have held out but ever since the offer was
made the village has been stricken by mysterious fires.
Evidence is sketchy, although foreign experts visiting the area say
that they have seen fires being started by men who, when questioned,
openly admit that they are acting on behalf of palm oil companies. And
coincidentally or not, the loss of forest land benefits the companies
in several ways.
With their rattan and fruit trees destroyed, locals are more likely to
yield to the temptation of a windfall buy-out. The company may pay
less in compensation for burned land than for productive forest - and
the ruin of farmers creates a labour force of needy workers. "The
company pays just 6,000 rupiah [35 pence] a day," says the Dayak man
who lost his fruit trees. "But we have no other choice."
http://www.independent.co.uk/index.html
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