ANTIDOTE The blanket of haze that drifts across Southeast Asia every year poses important questions about the governance of our region, and our economic policies.

The refusal of regional governments to confront these political and economic challenges means their citizens will continue to be suffocated by the smoke from the burning forests of Sumatra and Kalimantan.

Haze has been recorded in the region for decades. Sarawakians remember lighter episodes in the 1970s: a light ashen sky and a bright orange sun in the late evenings of the dry months. Elders called it "the forest-burning season".

haze shah alam 03 The most devastating episodes occurred in Malaysia in 1997 and 2013, but air pollution also had lower peaks in 1983, 1984, 1991, 1994 and 2005.

In 1997, President Suharto apologised for the haze, and called the fires a "natural disaster" caused by a freak weather phenomenon, El Niño. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono apologised again this year.

The haze is manmade, and can only be prevented by political will. The main contributing factors are both human: increasing population density, and giant plantations, producing palm oil, paper and pulp.

Influx of migrants and corporations

Indonesia's family planning policy is a systemic failure. Indonesia's population doubled in four decades, from 119.2 million in 1971 to 237.6 million in 2010.

Overcrowding on Java was addressed by Dutch colonialists, and then successive Indonesian governments, by the ‘transmigrasi policy', sending people from Java to Indonesia's green lungs of Sumatra, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya.

Overpopulation is explained largely by poverty and low education levels. An Indonesian forestry lecturer, Wiryono, in an opinion piece in the Jakarta Post , also attributes the population explosion to cultural factors. He worries about increasing extraction of natural resources and pollution.

"But some Indonesian Muslims are not worried. For them, fears of a human population exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity means a lack of faith in God," Wiryono argues.

"A Muslim myself, I understand the religious basis for having many children. But I also know the religious argument of Muslim supporters of birth control, which is to provide better education and health for future generations."

The other systemic failure in the long decades of fighting fires has been plantation land management.

NONE Parti Sosialis Malaysia's Dr Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj ( left ) noted that annual fires may start from open burning, or from pockets of fires that remain burning below the peat soil from past years. Excessive drainage of the peat for agriculture, caused by population pressure and plantations, has contributed to these smouldering peat fires.

Open burning must obviously be addressed, Jeyakumar pointed out, but in addition, extinguishing the underground peat fires may require efforts to dam up part of the drainage system and to raise the ground water level.

"The solution is neither technologically complicated nor expensive - we just have to build low dams along the drainage channels to ensure that the water table is not reduced too much," he said.

He believes plantation companies must be lobbying fiercely to ensure there is no political will to raise the water table, as plantations would face dwindling profits.

Self-regulation has failed

Corporations cannot be expected to regulate themselves any more than sharks can be recruited as lifeguards. Palm oil and timber plantation companies are clearly responsible for the thousands of fires on their concession areas, as shown by the Nasa satellite photos.

NONE But many corporations are trying to deflect blame onto other industries, local farmers and the Indonesian government. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an international accreditation organisation backed by an enormous number of palm oil companies, has defended its members in Indonesia.

The RSPO said it "commends those who took quick action to detect and quell the fires in their concessions," and reported that none of the hotspots in the concession territories of four of its member companies in Riau lasted more than a day.

Environmental NGO Greenpeace said satellite images dispute the RSPO's findings. "Many of these hotspots are virtually on top of one another and over consecutive days, casting doubt on RSPO claims that all fires were extinguished within 24 hours."

Greenpeace highlighted findings by the World Resources Institute that a fifth member company, Jatim Jaya Perkasa, that had failed to cooperate with the RSPO's request for concession maps, had 74 hotspots in its concession.

The RSPO was established in 2004, but has not tackled the role of its members in creating the conditions that lead to the fires, nor held them accountable, Greenpeace said.

"It's time for individual palm oil companies to step up and set the bar higher than the RSPO," said Bustar Maitar, head of the Greenpeace Indonesia Forest Campaign.

Business and political elite's moral hazard

The three nations most deeply involved in plantations in Indonesia are also the three most devastated by the haze. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are the main investors in the plantations in Riau. All three national governments bend over backwards, in their laissez-faire economic policies, to favour the palm oil corporations.

The political clout of the palm oil industry is staggering. Golden Agri, the world's second largest producer, reported in March that it had 464,300 hectares of oil palm plantations in Indonesia (nearly three times the size of the state of Malacca), and a market capitalisation in Singapore of US$6 billion, or RM19.2 billion (roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Negeri Sembilan).

palm oil plantation 111005 In order to stop the haze, Indonesia must work, together with neighbouring countries, to relieve the pressure on the land imposed by burgeoning migrant populations and corporate interests. But corporate "policy capture", corruption, family planning, transmigrasi and rural poverty are all huge, thorny, intractable political issues contributing to the haze. Indonesia, for all its economic growth, continues to struggle with the nemesis of skewed income distribution.

Political solutions appear distant. Political parties, facing a presidential election next year, are reluctant to implement new policies, let alone controversial ones. The haze reminds us all that our collective well-being is fundamentally linked to political questions.

How can the corporate-friendly, "hands-off" economic policies of the governments in our region roll back environmental degradation, poverty and pressure on land in Indonesia?

How can market forces possibly keep corporations from harming the environment, both for the locals and their neighbours? Wealthy politicians and corporate leaders are always able to escape to Australia or Hong Kong.

Moral hazard describes people's irrational, reckless behaviour, when others bear the burden of risk, as well as the consequences. This principle in economics is illustrated by the perennial haze, as much as it is by the ongoing global banking crisis.

Moral hazard means, for the foreseeable future, more haze.

Part 1:

Greed gets in your eyes

KERUAH USIT is a human rights activist - ‘ anak Sarawak, bangsa Malaysia '. This weekly column is an effort to provide a voice for marginalised Malaysians. Keruah Usit can be contacted at keruah_usit@yahoo.com