Skip to main content

Indonesia can't maintain their forests

 Illegal forest clearing fires in Indonesia's Sumatra Island are sending haze across the Malacca Strait to neighboring Malaysia and Singapore, causing the worst air pollution since 2006, officials said Thursday.

The haze prompted Malaysia to alert vessels in the Malacca Strait of poor visibility as short as two nautical miles and shut many schools.

Singapore, covered in thick smoke this week, saw its three-hour Pollutant Standards Index recording rise to an "unhealthy" range of 108 as of 6 p.m. (1000 GMT), much higher than 80 on Wednesday, which was the worst since 2006.

The port and international airport are still functioning normally.

"The suspicion is that this is coming from forests that have been opened up for plantations. We think it may be for palm oil," Purwasto Saroprayogi, head of the land and forest fires department at Indonesia's Environment Ministry, told Reuters.

Saroprayogi said the haze was caused by fires lit to clear land illegally in Dumai and Bengkalis districts in Riau province, in the north of Sumatra Island.

Indonesia has a long history of weak forestry law enforcement and illegal land clearing by palm oil developers is not uncommon.

Fires clear land quickly and reduce the acidity of peatland soil, but release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the air.

The haze returned to the region less than a week after environment ministers in Southeast Asia met in Brunei to address land and forest fires, which drew immediate flak from neighbors.

"This is not the first time that we have informed the Indonesians that they should pay attention to hot spots in Sumatra and Borneo," Singapore's Environment Minister Yaacob Ibrahim told reporters on Wednesday.

Yaacob said if the haze worsened, "we will register our concerns again, perhaps on even stronger terms, to our Indonesian colleagues," adding Singapore may seek to reconvene another meeting to find "additional measures" to mitigate the problem.

Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said Kuala Lumpur was seeking "more cooperation" from Jakarta in tackling the haze problem.

"According to the reports we've received, the haze originates from there (Indonesia). We are not simply making accusation but we want action before the haze spreads and becomes more detrimental to Malaysia," he said.

Muhyiddin, also education minister, said schools in Muar town in southern Johor state had been closed and about 5,000 masks were distributed after air quality hit hazardous levels, the Star newspaper reported Thursday.

The worst haze hit the region in 1997-98, when drought caused by El Nino led to major Indonesian fires. The smoke spread to Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand and cost more than $9 billion in damage to tourism, transport and farming.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents  By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith.   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy.   But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...