Indonesia's fires are expanding .. What is their relationship to palm oil forests?

Suhaib Jassim-Jakarta

For two days, the sky in Jambi province, south of West Sumatra, has turned red in the afternoon, after weeks of ongoing fires in several provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan.

The fires have devoured 329,000 hectares of forests, farms and nature reserves, the largest area burned since 2015, and the second largest wave of fires under the current president, Goku Widodo.

The head of the organization, Donnie Mondardo, recently spoke on a television program that 90% of the fires are deliberate man-made, and that 80% of them later turn after the fires to the plantations of palm oil.

He said that palm oil imports are significant for the country, and it is necessary to diversify agricultural production and not convert all green areas into palm oil. This is where criticism of environmental activists linking the burning of forests and their cause, and how they later turn to oil palm plantations in a country that is the most productive in the world. .

Smoke creeps
It is noteworthy that the smoke of fires covered large areas of the islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra, and spread to parts of neighboring Malaysia and Singapore.

The government is facing criticism from citizens affected by air pollution, for its inability to extinguish fires and deal with its health, economic and social effects, because of its impact on the lives of people in six provinces, including dozens of provinces.

The fires come after nearly five months of drought that hit most of the country's regions, which began to experience a groundwater crisis and in the springs and rivers, in what is described as the phenomenon of `` El Nino '', which dries the swamp forests, and it is difficult to extinguish the fires to extend the roots of trees and plants where dozens of meters under the soil.

Hundreds of thousands of people in some provinces - including Riau on Sumatra - have been exposed to respiratory diseases and bottlenecks, and this has affected the lives of farmers, students, schoolchildren and staff, who have had to stop moving.

Violations
The Minister of Environment and Forestry Siti Nur Bayah said that the ministry began taking the quarantine measures on areas up to about 9 thousand hectares, the licenses to benefit from its green cover to 52 companies, in irregularities related to the fires.

For his part, head of the disaster management agency Mondardo said it is difficult to overcome the fires in the swamp forests spread in six provinces of Jambi, Riau and South Sumatra on the island of Sumatra, as well as Central and South Kalimantan.

He pointed out that the government did everything in its power without the ability to overcome the fires, considering that the swamp forests constitute 89% of the burned areas, which have approached 330 thousand hectares since the beginning of this year, including 40 thousand hectares in the province of Riau alone, which is one of the worst Environment where pollution is dangerous to levels that are not considered livable.