SINGAPORE, 7 October 2006 — Walk around Singapore these days and you might be forgiven if you think you are in an industrial town in a rust belt area. The air has a certain thickness and at times there is a slight burning smell in the air. There is a daily cloud over the city that blocks visibility. Why is all this happening in a city that has a record of being green?
The answer lies on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in neighboring Indonesia. Indonesia which host the world’s second largest area of rain forest after the Amazon forest in Brazil, has suffered from annual forest fires caused by slash-and-burn techniques. These forest fires have been the cause of an annual pollution problem in Southeast Asia since the 1990s. Indonesia, Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and even parts of Thailand are engulfed by a fog known as the haze.
This year’s forest fires have been particularly bad. Singapore’s pollution standard index (PSI,) which measures air quality, has reached a record high of 80 (A PSI reading between zero and 50 is considered “healthy”, 51-100 “moderate” and 101-200 “unhealthy”) and on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra, visibility has been cut to around 200 meters. This year’s haze has brought back memories of the choking haze that covered the region in 1997-1998, which caused many people to suffer from respiratory illnesses and wrecked local economies by causing a drop in productivity through illnesses and a decrease in tourism.
The annual haze has been a source of tension between Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, with the former two blaming Indonesia for not doing enough to curb the slash-and-burn techniques used to clear land by plantation owners and farmers. The complaints of the Malaysian and Singaporean governments were rebuffed Thursday by Indonesia’s Forestry Minister Malem Sambat Kaban who argued that the Indonesian government was on a tireless drive to put out the fires. Under Indonesian law, slash-and-burn techniques are illegal but prosecuting those engaged in this has been difficult. This has been blamed on a lack of resources and funds.
The haze has been one of the few areas that has seen large-scale cooperation between regional governments. Galvanized by the 1997-98 fires, Southeast Asian countries signed the ASEAN agreement on trans-boundary haze pollution in 2002, but Indonesia has yet to ratify the pact that calls for cooperation and mobilization of resources to tackle the problem.
