ASEAN Urged to Fight the Smog Or Choke On It
7/30/99
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Title: ASEAN Urged to Fight the Smog or Choke on it
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: July 30, 1999
A choking smog from burning rainforests returned to Southeast Asia
this week, frightening citizens and exposing weak government efforts
to tackle the problem as useless, regional analysts and
environmentalists say.
The smog from man-made fires, mainly in Indonesia, revived nightmares
of a 1997 environmental disaster that cost Indonesia, Singapore and
Malaysia an estimated $4 billion and caused sickness and breathing
problems throughout the region.
As regional nations recover painfully from the Asian economic crisis,
a rerun of the smog disaster would send tourists packing at a time
when they and their money are most needed.
Satellite pictures show clearly that the fires are started partly by
small farmers but largely in plantations where owners slash and burn
the rainforest, breaking fire-control laws with impunity, the
environmentalists say.
Only this month, the regional political group ASEAN (the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations) announced a plan to prevent fires, but
based only on education and surveillance.
Few believe it has any hope of preventing a new disaster.
"The fact that the haze has appeared again is a glaring sign of
ASEAN's failure," said Simon Tay, law professor and Singapore
lawmaker.
Tay called for organisations like the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund to use a carrot-and-stick approach with Indonesia and
tie loans to effective fire-control measures.
ASEAN member states, unwilling in an unstable region to criticise
their neighbours, have traditionally placed a high value on problem-
solving by consensus and have been brought to task for soft-pedalling
on pressing problems.
Koh Kheng Lian, a University of Singapore law professor, said: "There
is a lot of call for more real action rather than the consensus
way... It has been demonstrated that it doesn't work."
She said direct pressure on Indonesia from neighbours choking on its
smoke was needed. "We are just about to recover (from economic
crisis) and there again is this haze, so I think in terms in dollars
and cents they must do something," she added.
Koh said ASEAN was prodded to draft a detailed air pollution plan
only when the 1997 haze had caused real economic pain.
Even then the plan was seen by some as a short-term attempt to avoid
a smog embarrassment by ensuring clear skies ahead of the Southeast
Asian Games in Brunei in early August.
On Friday, Brunei government sources denied an Indonesian newspaper
report that the nation had threatened to sue Indonesia for causing
smog ahead of the games next week.
Government attempts to hide or ignore the problem have not helped.
Malaysia drew criticism from environmentalists in June when it
stopped public release of its Air Pollution Index.
"We are not sure what exactly is happening. Even on the Indonesian
side, it's not clear what's actually happening on the ground," said
Teoh Teik Hoong, an official of the World Wide Fund for Nature in
Malaysia.
The real solution rests with Indonesia.
Bruce Gale, of the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy in
Singapore, said only Indonesia could put out the fires and that
neither the political ability nor the will existed in Jakarta.
"It would be far more difficult now for Indonesia to put out the
fires now than it was during the Suharto era because they are not
only facing an economic recession, but they are trying to see who's
going to be the next president," he said.