Planes can’t land, schools are closed, states of emergency imposed and the Indonesian President Joko Widodo makes a surprise visit to still-smoking South Sumatra. This is the new normal for Southeast Asian summers — choking haze from Indonesian forest fires. Unlike past years, the pall hardly makes a headline in the Hong Kong press. For Singaporeans, Malaysian and Indonesians the inconvenience and ill health are something they have to live with. This year is no exception. The Singapore government has a special website.
The forest fires are set partly to clear land for palm oil plantations. Innovative efforts are going into tracking down the culprits, who in the past were able to get away with burning forest land for plantations because of the difficulty of figuring exactly what was going on in locations that are far from Jakarta.
Washington, D.C.-based environmental group World Resources Institute (WRI) is using satellites and computers to identify the sites of fire down to one square kilometer in size. Here is a link to WRI’s forest-fire tracking site and WRI’s latest blog on the subject.
Although almost half of the forest fires take place in large plantation holders’ concessions, conservationist Erik Meijaard argues that the focus on large plantation-holders misses the point. Given that a majority of burning is taking place outside of large concession-holders’ boundaries, sometimes “just for fun,” he says that the government needs to get serious about fire prohibitions and take the total costs of development (whether slash-and-burn agriculture or development of coastal peatlands) into account.
“The key point is that the fire and haze problem in Indonesia is complex, with multiple actors playing a role. Focusing on large concessions alone, which the Indonesian government and also non-government organizations seem to do, is not going to do much to reduce the problem,” writes Meijaard. “Anyone who has ever spent time in Kalimantan or Sumatra during the dry season knows that burning land for agriculture, for hunting, or just for fun is a favorite pastime of many.”
This note from a friend who owns a palm oil plantation and has taken numerous measures to implement sustainable palm oil cultivation – details at some of the problems.
The palm plantation owner writes:
“What is causing the fires burning on degraded peat forest and unproductive scrubland in the province of Riau, Sumatra? These are the fires that create the haze affecting Singapore, Malaysia and the province of Riau itself.
From my own experience, I can identify several causes of these annually occurring fires each dry season.
• Contractors of palm oil companies who accidentally start fires that quickly get out of control unless management immediately intervenes
• Small holders practicing slash and burn as a cheap way to clear land for planting intentionally burn their own land
• Large plantations with poor Environmental, Health and Safety practices have thousands of employees who may behave in unsafe ways like tossing cigarette butts into dry scrub

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