After being named and shamed, major Indonesian companies have spent millions on firefighting and repairing their reputations
SINGAPORE (Sept 30): Herman, a small-time farmer in Pekanbaru, capital of Riau province in Indonesia, used to raze his land after harvesting the crops on his 1ha plot. He is not exactly sure why he did it, only that that was what he was taught by his father. “It makes the land look clean, all brown and black,” he says in Bahasa Indonesia.
But today, with irrigation pipes embedded throughout his 3ha plot and various crops that are harvested at different times, Herman will be royally upset if the neighbouring farmers set fire to their lands to carry out slash-and-burn agriculture, as that would risk destroying the infrastructure he has invested in.
With an IDR800 million ($77,846) loan disbursed by his village chief, Herman, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, expanded his previous 1ha plot and bought more seeds. He has been taught fertilisation techniques and crop rotation, and has seen his yield of crops, including cucumbers, long beans, spinach and corn, rise exponentially. While Herman used to make about IDR25 million a month, that has grown to about IDR45 million on average. He sometimes even rakes in IDR100 million. And, instead of enlisting his wife to toil alongside him, Herman has hired eight villagers to work for him. His wife’s job now is to take care of the latest addition to their family of five.
Herman is a success story of a programme called Integrated Forestry and Farming System (IFFS), launched by Asia Pulp & Paper in 2016. That was a year after raging fires in Indonesia blanketed Singapore in thick haze and the city state pointed fingers at APP, one of the biggest producers of pulp, paper and packaging in the world, saying that its parent company, Sinar Mas Group, had failed to show that it was not linked to the disaster. Supermarkets here pulled APP’s paper products off their shelves.
Four years on, the company is determined to keep fires off its concession lands and repair the damage to its reputation. It has pumped US$130 million ($179 million) into fire prevention, detection and suppression efforts on its estates. This includes hiring a fire consultant from Australia to train its firefighters, doubling the number of firefighters on its concession lands in Riau and East and West Kalimantan to 2,500 and implementing practices such as daily patrols, investigating all hotspots, plotting out problematic areas and stationing men and equipment there. There are also employees standing guard at lookout towers, which give a visibility of 10km with the aid of binoculars. The men are trained to monitor and respond to fires or hotspots with military precision.
After an audit conducted by the Singapore Environment Council (SEC) from December 2017 to March 2018, APP received an enhanced Singapore green label scheme certification. Its products will be back on local shelves in October or November.
In 2015, 2.6 million hectares of land were lost to fires across the whole of Indonesia. The fires, exacerbated by hot and dry weather brought about by the El Niño climate phenomenon, was estimated by the World Bank to have cost the largest economy in Southeast Asia US$16 billion — more than double the sum spent on rebuilding Aceh after the 2004 tsunami. In 2016, the area lost to fire fell to 438,000ha, and further to 165,000ha in 2017 and 72,115ha last year.
This could, in part, be attributed to better weather, although the weather in Indonesia has been hot and dry recently. From January to July this year, fires occurred on 135,747ha of land across the country.
Paper firms turn over a new leaf
APP is not the only company that has been battling fires in Riau and Kalimantan. Pulp and paper producer APRIL Group, another major concession land holder, had since 2014 put in place similar measures to stop villagers from carrying out illegal slash-and-burn practices, and has teams ready to quickly put out any fires.
Even before the 2015 haze, APRIL, whose parent company is Royal Golden Eagle Group, had been working with 77 communities to stop fires in Riau on areas spanning more than 622,112ha — about nine times the size of Singapore. Villagers were taught new agricultural methods other than burning to clear land, and communities that achieve a zero-burn target for the year get funding for infrastructure projects such as mosques or schools.
APRIL has invested more than US$9 million in fire suppression resources, including two helicopters, two airboats, 39 lookout towers, 482 water pumps and firefighting training for 724 volunteers across 39 Riau villages.
Like APP, APRIL has also been given the enhanced Singapore green label scheme certification by SEC. Launched in January 2017, SEC’s green label certification for pulp and paper products was meant to “become a rallying point for consumer action against companies contributing to the haze, with successful boycotts resulting in non-certified products being pulled from supermarket shelves”.
Both companies also monitor and fight fires outside of their concession areas. APP goes up to 5km outside of its concession and APRIL, 3km. Both companies are keen to point out that while fires had occurred on their land in 2015, they were not started by them.
There is some evidence to support their claim. APRIL has 455,000ha of plantation, but according to a KPMG report, just 756ha were damaged by fire in 2015 — “a remarkably low area, given the crisis in South Sumatra and Kalimantan”, remarks Craig Tribolet, sustainability operations manager at APRIL and chair of the Fire Free Alliance.
Bernard Tan, country president for Singapore at Sinar Mas Group, says 1% of APP’s concession area was on fire in 2015. Sinar Mas says it has no data on the monetary loss. Tan points out that the company does not slash and burn, because the acacia and eucalyptus trees it plants for pulp are harvested almost down to the ground. “There’s nothing to clear and burning brings no benefits,” he says.
Along with their firefighting efforts, the companies are also going to some lengths to make amends. Giam Siak Kecil-Bukit Batu, a 705,000ha peatland area in Sumatra, has been declared a Unesco Man and the Biosphere Reserve and supports a sustainable timber industry. APP had funded and initiated the creation of this biosphere reserve, points out Lahiru Wijedasa, a peat swamp ecologist at the National University of Singapore. “[The companies] made a lot of money by clearing forests and changing them into plantations. If you’re talking about the whole life cycle, originally what they did was wrong,” he says. He adds that he used to be angry with the companies when he started working on haze issues in 2004. But, he acknowledges that because of pressure from non-governmental organisations and the public, many have changed the way they do things.
Meanwhile, APRIL says it protects or conserves 370,070ha of peatland and mineral soil. This includes 150,852ha of peatland ecosystem restoration under its Restorasi Ekosistem Riau programme — an area twice the size of Singapore.
Root of the problem
Yet, around Sept 10, there were more than 72,000 fire alerts reported in Indonesia, according to Global Forest Watch. “This was unusually high compared with the same week in previous years,” says a statement on the website. On Sept 17, as thick clouds of smoke emanated from the wildfires across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra, air travel was disrupted and schools were closed.
Indonesian officials told international media that about 80% of those fires were intentionally caused to make room for oil palm plantations. “That’s how they clear the land, using the cheapest method and conducted by many people,” says Agus Wibowo, a spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster management agency. The agency identified 2,900 hotspots throughout the country, including a large number of wildfires burning on the islands of Sulawesi and Java and in Papua province.
The latest satellite mapping shows a mass of countless hotspots in Kalimantan, and in scattered parts of Sumatra. Singapore has been enveloped in haze. PSI readings were in the unhealthy range on Sept 22, somewhat obscuring the skyline that served as the world-famous backdrop for the Singapore Grand Prix happening that night.
The root of the problem is literally in the ground. When Indonesian authorities carved out the concession lands for companies to turn into oil palm and pulp wood plantations, farmers had to drain the peatlands of water so that crops could grow.
Says Wijedasa: “We need to be rational about it. People can point their fingers at companies and say it’s their fault. Yes, they did deforest, but it was [a result of] government policies in the 1980s and 1990s to convert peatland into plantations. And now, you see a lot of smallholders doing it too.”
Peatland is formed when the annual rate of biomass production is greater than the rate of decomposition. Wijedasa explains that peatland, when drained, becomes extremely dry and the organic material that forms the top portion of the soil then becomes extremely combustible. Draining one area also affects the next, so while companies and smallholders may have drained only their lands, it will also dry up the neighbouring peatlands — even those that are not used for agriculture. “The reason this is important is that land under agriculture will have people to put fires out. But areas not under agriculture or some form of land use do not have people to put them out, Wijedasa explains.”
Peat catches fire easily — it is like the fire starter used to light a barbecue fire, says Sinar Mas’ Tan — and can be ignited by a lit cigarette butt or cooking flames left unattended. This worsens in dry seasons, just like in 2015 when the El Niño phenomenon swept across the globe.
When The Edge Singapore visited APP’s concessions in early September, before the haze hit Singapore, its team of firefighters said the last fire they fought was two weeks before. The fire was on land spanning 30ha, and it took the team five days to put it out. It had happened outside the concession, probably started by smallholders who wanted to clear their lands or it could have been accidental.
Meanwhile, the wet season is not expected for a while. Indonesia’s weather bureau says it will probably start around late October or November in Sumatra and Kalimantan — two months later than normal. The wet season may not start in other parts of the vast archipelago until December, raising the prospect of a prolonged haze season.
Digging deeper
Even as companies and the Indonesian government concentrate on firefighting efforts, conservationists such as Wijedasa say the solution has to be more comprehensive because the root of the problem lies deep. He advocates more R&D on the issue. “We need to look at agriculture that is not based on draining. And that doesn’t exist [currently].”
He suggests that companies and governments invest money into looking at ways to use peatland without having to drain it so that the land is not susceptible to fires. “If you do it without draining, it is going to result in less income, but it will be sustainable in the long term,” he explains. “If we do nothing about it, just the oxidation of peat soil is causing the land to [subside] at 5cm a year. With fires, it’s going by half a metre. Every time there is a fire, the elevation is probably going down. Most of the peatland is located in coastal areas and, eventually, in 50 or 60 years, the land is going to get flooded. It has to be a long-term view of how we’re going to look at this sustainably.”
To be fair, the Indonesian government has been trying to tackle the issue. The haze that originates from the country and drifts over to Malaysia and Singapore has been a major source of embarrassment to President Joko Widodo and is causing tensions between the countries. It has also affected the health of his people and the economy.
The 2015 haze killed 19 Indonesians and more than half a million people were diagnosed with respiratory illnesses. One study, published in 2016 by scientists at Harvard and Columbia universities, estimated that more than 100,000 people in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore died prematurely due to the extreme haze conditions in 2015.
Singapore, too, has calculated the monetary impact of the haze. Economists Euston Quah and Chia Wai Mun from Nanyang Technological University estimate that the total cost of the 2015 haze episode, which lasted two months, amounted to $1.83 billion, or 0.45% of the country’s GDP.
In September 2018, Jokowi signed a moratorium on new oil palm project licences and mandated a review of existing licences. Recently, he made the moratorium permanent. However, the implementation and licence review “remain very slow”, says World Resource Institute’s sustainable commodities and business manager Andika Putraditama.
Putraditama, however, admits that Indonesia has made good progress in reducing deforestation in recent years compared with other tropical countries, and there have been fewer fires from 2016 to last year. This year, there may have been more fires than in previous years, but it is “still less than 2015”, he adds.
“Whatever we’ve been doing since 1997 doesn’t work,” counters Wijedasa. “It is not just about stopping the haze, but also about the long-term economic prosperity for companies and communities. There is no silver bullet.”
