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Haze: Burning forests to create plantations

When clearning forests for commercial plantation, the accepted way is to burn them. The more responsible companies fell the trees, cart away what can fetch a profit, and then set fire to it. This is done by such important plantation companies as Guthrie's, Highland and Lowlands, Kuala Lumpur Kepong, right down to the smaller companies. An uncle opened new estates for Guthries as recent as the early 1980s in such fashion. And I saw this happening as a young man in the estate where my father worked in the vicinity of what is now Pasir Gudang in Johore. The director of one of the companies in the Honour List says this is the norm.

What is different is that in the 1950s, there would perhaps be about 5,000 ha forests opened for plantations annually, whereas today a plantation 20 times that in Indonesia is considered a "middling" one. So we have a forest area as large as Sarawak converted into plantations at once, thus ensuring an ecological and environmental disaster waiting to happen. Since it is Bolehland insistence that "big is beautiful", the Malaysians replicate good plantation practice in a big way to cause all the problems of ecological damage. Despite their proud boast that the environment is taken care to ensure minimal damage, I know of no plantation companies in Bolehland bar one that did have such experts on their staff with the power to overrule commercial considerations. So, we are still not looking at the issue in the way it should.

It is possible to argue that with the former sensible opening up, much of the worst effects of ecological damage can be contained. But that is not possible now. In Indonesia, the cutting down of the logs is not the norm. So, the trees are burnt alive. The fire gets to the roots and burns buried fallen trees that time and nature has buried. And that burns on. In Kota Bharu, the dump site the British Military Administration set up in 1945 is still there, and the "phenomenon" of hot gas arising out of the ground stil can be seen. It is possible that the open burning that was the norm in the 1940s to the 1990s had created the peat fire that still smoulders. That is always the danger. Ghani Ismail talked of burning pineapple plants caused by it. Is it wise to open large areas indiscriminately as is done in Indonesia?

When Malaysian companies come and tell Malaysians that they do not indulge in such nefarious practices, they are engaging in Bolehland gobbledygook, or do not know, or a mixture of both. Ecologists and environmentalists have not inveighed against responsible adaptation of forests into plantations, only those that are done in such grand scale, usually by those who do not know one end of a tree to another. But that is another facet we have come to expect in Bolehland. After all, high school dropouts run tutorial colleges for overseas university degrees. So, why cannot a Ph.D. in the teaching of social science run a plantation company?

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my