ASEAN to Push Plantation Owners to Halt Burning
8/26/99
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Title: ASEAN to Push Plantation Owners to Halt Burning
Source: Reuters Limited
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: August 26, 1999
Southeast Asian environment ministers today said they planned to meet
Indonesian and Malaysian plantation owners to get them to stop
setting fires amid fears of a recurrence of 1997's regional smog
crisis.
Environment ministers from the Association of South East Asian
Nations (ASEAN) told reporters in Singapore the meeting could occur
as early as late September.
"Plantations are the key source of the (smog) problem," Singapore's
Minister for the Environment Lee Yock Suan told reporters after their
annual meeting in Singapore, which was brought forward two months
because of renewed concern.
Massive fires in 1997 on Sumatra island and the Indonesia side of
Borneo island threw up a huge smoke cloud that smothered much of
Southeast Asia, costing the region $4 billion and damaging tourism.
Though the smoke has returned to a lesser degree this summer, the
ministers said wet weather associated this year has helped control
the fires and smoke for now.
But they said weather experts predicted a likely recurrence of the
dry weather associated with the El Nino phenomenon, which aggravated
the 1997 crisis, by next year or 2001.
Officials said the meeting with plantation owners would take place at
Pekanbaru in the Indonesian province of Riau, which has been
blanketed by thick smoke in recent months. Riau is in Sumatra.
No other details were given of the planned gathering.
An Indonesian minister said it was nearly impossible to prosecute
plantation owners under Indonesian law due to large loopholes.
Indonesia's delegation gave reporters a map showing hot spots in Riau
in July and which included the names of the plantation companies that
owned the blackened areas.
Plantation owners and farmers were widely criticized for setting
fires in 1997 to clear large swathes of land. Such burning off occurs
annually but the fires that year reached massive proportions, fueled
by drought.
Aca Sugandhy, Indonesia's assistant minister for natural
environmental management, said no plantation owners had been
prosecuted for the environmental destruction they caused, but two
cases were in the Indonesian court system.
He said he hoped loopholes would be closed in the next three years to
allow easier prosecution.
He said one million acres of land had been burned in Indonesia so far
this year, less than half as much as in 1997.