Raj Rajendran, Singapore – Southeast Asian environment ministers meeting this weekend have little hope of finding a way to extinguish Indonesia's raging forest fires, experts said on Wednesday.
Ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Brunei on Saturday might best focus on prevention of future fires, rather than cure, they said.
"There is very little chance of controlling the fires at this stage," said Dennis Dykstra of the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) at Bogor, near Jakarta. "There's too many of them and too widely spread. It's not humanly possible to put them out."
"The focus needs to be on developing, first, the policies and, second, ways to implement them that will prevent these kind of things in the future."
Dykstra said a Japanese remote sensing system showed up to 5,000 "hot spots" on the island of Borneo.
The experts said the fires were likely to burn unabated until October, when seasonal monsoon rains should put them out.
"They (ASEAN) don't really have the expertise to recommend short-term solutions to put out the fire," said David Glover, director of the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA).
The ASEAN ministers are expected to formalise a task force with funds from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to take the lead in the battle against the fires, sources said.
The ministers, who have already met twice in the last four months, have devised a regional plan and sought outside help to combat the fires, after the region was blanketed with a thick smog from the Indonesian fires between August and October.
Experts said these actions, when implemented, would be too late to douse the flames in the jungles of Kalimantan, Indonesia's part of Borneo, but they could be used to ease the misery of people living in towns on the fringes of these fires.
"The government can target this area and make people feel better," Dykstra said.
Experts said fires in the second year of an El Nino weather pattern, as now, are always worse than in the first because the forests are drier after the fires and drought of the first year. "I can see that the forest (around the Kalimantan town of Samarinda) is already black and dry. Very, very dry," said Caroline Purba, a field researcher with the Indonesian Forum for Environment, who had just returned from there.
"The fire has become worse. I think it's too late to stop. It's worse than the forest fire in 1997," she said.
Purba said intense efforts were being made to fight the fires, with help coming from the army, villagers and nature club members.
Glover said a similar trend was seen in the last El Nino drought in 1982 and 1983, when the forest fires were more severe in the second year than the first.
He said the EEPSEA, having put the economic cost of the 1997 smog at $1.4 billion, was expecting severe damage in 1998.
Singapore's tourism earnings are expected to fall about S$1.5 billion (US$930 million) this year if smog again shrouds much of Southeast Asia as it did in 1997. Other countries in the region are likely to suffer at least as much.
The smog from the fires burning on Borneo is being blown away from Southeast Asia by southwesterly winds, but these would change to easterly winds in May and bring the smoke to Singapore and west Malaysia.
Dykstra said the smog could be less harmful this time if the fires do not spread to peat beds, which have a high concentration of sulphuric acid.
The experts said Indonesia's troubles would not end when the fires are put out as the peat fires of last year had removed a lot of the jungles' natural ability to absorb water, so floods and soil erosion would be commonplace during the next monsoon.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.