ASEAN urges Indonesia to tackle forest fires
© 2000 Reuters Limited
October 9, 2000
KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia - Southeast Asian environment ministers urged Indonesia on Saturday to take steps against forest fires which sparked a regional smog crisis in 1997 as dry weather was expected again next year.
The ministers also said ASEAN was preparing a Transboundary Haze Pollution pact, expected to be finalised within a year, to tackle the smog problem. No details were available.
"Meteorologist in the region have predicted the La Nina wet weather is reaching its tail end and that there is a 30 percent chance of El Nino returning next year," they said in a joint statement.
"The ministers urged Indonesia to take effective enforcement measures to tackle plantation and forest fires in order to prevent a repeat of the 1997 regional haze."
The statement was issued at the end of the eighth ministerial meeting on the environment of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the east Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo.
Smoke from slash-and-burn forest fires three years ago in Sumatra and Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo island, choked parts of Southeast Asia and took a heavy toll on health and tourism in Malaysia and Singapore.
The fires were also blamed on a drought induced by the El Nino weather pattern, a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean which brings dry conditions.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The next meeting would be held in Myanmar in 2003.
Indonesia's Assistant Minister for Global Environment Affairs, Effendy Sumardja, was quoted by Malaysia's Bernama news agency as saying after the meeting Jakarta would make public the list of individuals or firms which conducted open burning.
Indonesia will also send a team to Malaysia to study how it enforces open burning regulation, Bernama quoted him as saying.
Forest fires appeared again in Sumatra and Kalimantan in the middle of this year, sending smog over Singapore, parts of Malaysia and southern Thailand, triggering renewed anger at Indonesia's perennial problem with the fires.
Experts say the fires are mostly set by plantation firms trying to clear land, although farmers using slash and burn agriculture have also been blamed.
But Indonesian government officials said the current rainy season was expected to douse the remaining fires. Heavy rains have hit some parts of the archipelago during this year's dry season because of La Nina, a pattern of cool sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.