Fiddling while the Forest Burn
10/1/97
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Headline: Fiddling while the Forest Burn
Date: 10/1/97
Reports from experienced foreign observers who have recently returned from
Central Kalimantan make it clear that the massive fires burning in the
President's One Million Hectare rice development project have been
deliberately started, on instructions from above. The actual area involved
is really 1.4 million ha, not the 1.0 million figure that has been
popularized by the government. Funds for building the roads and canals in
this area are being taken from the Reforestation Fund - meant to pay for
reforesting areas previously attacked and often clear-felled by government
licensed logging concessionaires. The fund is already severely depleted by
being used to build aircraft, buy decrepit destroyers and support other
otherwise "unbankable" projects favored by the elite.
Much of the "clearing" that is going on in this area is being undertaken by
unlicensed contractors, who employ casual laborers to do the dirty work.
(NGOs in the area reported as long as two years ago that areas from 10 ha
upwards were being "sold" by the project to businessmen in Banjarmasin
(capital of South Kalimantan) to exploit in any way they liked.) The
present contractors have been setting fire to kilometers long swathes of
the remaining forest in the area, having first (illegally) cut and sold the
first class tropical hardwood to timber mills in Banjarmasin; it would be
surprising if any royalties or taxes have been paid on this timber. The
remaining "sub-standard" timber (called "fourth class" by the locals) will
be used by other contractors to build "houses" for the transmigrants that
will be dispatched to the area in the future, to provide cheap captive
labour. Locals estimate that the houses built from this timber will barely
last two years in Kalimantan's climate.
Having extracted everything that they can sell, they then set fire to the
devastated remains - as this is the cheapest way to clear it. With the dry
conditions prevailing in the area, and deliberate drainage of the peat
swamps by a network of canals as part of the project, the underlying peat
often catches fire - burning for weeks or months until the supply of fuel
is exhausted. If the fire does not burn "clean" it leaves behind many half-
burnt trees, which are often reignited by the heat and flames from the
burning peat - leaving behind, as one expert commented " a ticking time
bomb."
One of the major human impacts on traditional Dayak people living in the
project area - their rattan gardens, community forests and homes have been
completely burnt out. This is part of a deliberate government policy to
clear the area of all its current occupants, and to do so without paying
them any compensation for losses and hardships they are certainly
suffering. Other experts, previously working with orangutan in next door
East Kalimantan, estimate that possibly one-third of the total orangutan
population of eastern Kalimantan used to live in this area - no one knows
right now what has happened to them. All this is aside from the pall of
smoke that currently blankets much of Kalimantan, Sumatra, Singapore and
Malaysia.
It is not widely known that the environmental assessment (ANDAL, in
Indonesian) for this area, carried out by Bogor Agricultural University
(IPB) in 1995/96, recommended that most of the area be left untouched. In
outline their recommendations - never made public, despite a legal
requirement to do so - were that about 800,000 ha should be left as forest,
some 400,000 ha was suitable for agriculture (of which 100,000 ha were
already in use) while 200,000 ha was available for infrastructure,
settlements and other uses. Despite this, and because this is a
"Presidential Project," all of these recommendations have been ignored, and
the whole area and all the local communities, forests and wildlife
devastated by logging and arson.
Indonesia has also made much of its efforts to fight the fires that have
been raging through Kalimantan and Sumatra - aside from the ones that have
been deliberately lit. A center for locating fires has been set up in the
Department of Environment, relaying information from satellites and other
sources to the Department's regional offices in Ujung Pandang (South
Sulawesi) and Pekanbaru (central east Sumatra) to assist in coordinating
firefighting efforts. This information is then passed on to ABRI (the
army), so they can check that they have correctly located the fire. The
army goes out, reports confirmation of the location, and then goes back to
eating, sleeping and playing chess. The bottom line is that virtually no
firefighting is being done by Indonesians (at least those employed by the
government), while the well intentioned efforts of other countries, like
Canada and Australia, are being successfully hampered by red tape and
arrogance. One can only wonder what the 1,000 or so untrained firefighters
sent from Malaysia must be thinking as they risk their lives (reportedly,
some have already been killed) to fight fires that Indonesia is pretending
do not exist.