Squatters Could Be The Culprits Behind Haze

By Sakina Mohamed KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 2 (Bernama) -- In 1994, Dr Francis Ng traveled by road through hundreds of kilometers of burnt ground in Kalimantan, Indonesia, to investigate the cause of the haze. The Malaysian botanist had then just been made the director at the newly established Centre for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia. At the time, the entire south of Kalimantan was blanketed in haze and the airports had to be closed. DOWN THE FIERY PATH The fires were low, producing more smoke than heat, so the roads were still usable. He found squatter homes all along the road, each about 100m apart. Every house was occupied. Ng noted that each squatter family farmed about a quarter or half an acre beside the road but claimed many acres beyond their road frontage. “To maintain their claims they had to burn the wild vegetation that came up every year on their uncultivated land. They hope one day that a plantation company will obtain ownership of the land and pay them compensation. “These are impoverished squatter families, mostly Javanese, occupying what used to be inland forests. The fires will continue every year due to the absence of a land ownership system,” said Ng, who was the former chief of forest research with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. He said there might be millions of such families. They were in fact the children and grandchildren of the massive Indonesian transmigration programme of the 1960s and 70s. TRANSMIGRATION Under the Indonesian transmigration programme, poor farming families from the crowded Islands of Java, Bali and Madura were moved to the less densely populated islands of the archipelago. The Indonesian government had hoped that the resettlement would encourage development and raise their living standards. However, human rights organisations have charged that the programme destroys indigenous communities while environmentalists found that it had contributed to ecological devastation and deforestation. Some of the places where farming communities have been sent have infertile land, making it difficult for the migrants to survive. Ng said in the peat swamp forests, for instance, squatters would occupy the area after logging with the intention of burning off all the peat to grow rice. “The annual burning will end when all the peat is burnt,” he said. The ecological destruction has also angered the native Dayaks, who have been practicing sustainable farming there, clearing only as much land as they could cultivate. The severe tension has led to bloodshed between the locals and the migrants in Kalimantan, as reported by the media since the late-1990s. THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM Ng said the true causes of the haze in Indonesia were never acknowledged nor published because of political sensitivities. “First the blame was put on the logging industry though it was never explained why the logging industry should set fire to the forests that sustain the industry. “Then the blame was put on the oil palm industry, despite the fact that forests only have to be cleared once to establish an oil palm plantation, not year after year,” he said. Recent studies of haze and fire in Sumatra and Kalimantan have unequivocally shown that small-scale farmers and mid-scale landowners were the main cause of fires and haze. However, governments and NGOs are still laying the blame on large plantation companies. A study published in the August 2015 edition of the journal Environmental Research Letters clearly showed that 59 percent of the fire emissions in Sumatra came from outside timber and oil-palm concession boundaries. For context, these non-concession related fires generated 62 percent of haze in equatorial Southeast Asia, affecting mostly Malaysia and Singapore. In order to address the annual burning by squatters and smallholders, Ng suggested that perhaps Indonesia could issue a temporary occupation licence to all squatters so they do not have to burn to maintain their claims. “This would buy time while they develop a more lasting political solution.” -- BERNAMA