OPINION | Non-Interference Means We Don't Interfere While You Choke?

By Sam Trailerman

Let me tell you how it really is. From down here. From the ground floor where the rest of us live.

Every year, same story. You wake up, you look out the window, and the sky is the colour of old teh tarik. Not blue. Not grey. Something in between that burns your throat. Your app says AQI 180, very unhealthy. The government says wear a mask. Your kid's school sends a WhatsApp: "Please bring inhaler." And somewhere on TV, a minister is shaking hands and talking about non-interference.

Welcome to haze season. Sponsored by your favorite cooking oil.

This year they finally put numbers to it. Greenpeace and those folks from Pantau Gambut counted. Not one, not ten. 6,811 smoke points from August to October across Kalimantan, Sumatra, Papua, Sulawesi. Satellites saw them. You can't hide fire from space, apparently, though God knows they've tried.

And out of that, 5,540 points they looked at closely. 859 inside timber concessions. 774 inside oil palm concessions. 2,951 inside peatland that is supposed to be protected. And 2,211 in places that already burned between 2015 and 2023. Which tells you everything. We burn it, we leave it, we burn it again. It's not an accident. It's a business model.

The list has more than 20 companies - palm, pulp, sugar. But in that list, sitting pretty in the Top 20, is one of our own. Kuala Lumpur Kepong - KLK. Big name on Bursa. Nice logo. They are linked to PT Menteng Jaya Sawit Perdana over in Indonesia. Same company was caught with fires on their land back in 2019. 2019! Seven years ago. And here we are again. It's like catching your neighbor stealing your mangoes every year and every year he says "Eh, not me lah."

And then Singapore, our favorite neighbor who complains about our smoke but - surprise - has fingers in the pie too. At least four concessions:

PT Damai Agro Sejahtera, which belongs to Bumitama Agri - headquarters in Singapore.

PT Kayung Agro Lestari, under First Resources.

PT Mitra, also First Resources, Fangiono family.

PT Arjuna Utama Sawit, part of First Borneo Plantations.

First Resources is listed in Singapore. KLK is listed here. When The Edge asked them for comment, they did what all big companies do best. Nothing. Silence. The most profitable sound in the world.

You have to admire the elegance of it. A company headquartered in a shiny glass tower in KL or Singapore, with air purifiers in every room, owns a piece of land 800km away that happens to be on fire. And the smoke just... travels. Like magic. It crosses the border all by itself. No passport needed. 41 days in Sarawak. 11 days in Sabah. 7 days in Johor. 5 days in KL. 3 days in Singapore.

Even Brunei and Philippines got a whiff. We export many things, but this is our most efficient export - we export poison air and call it trans-boundary haze to make it sound polite.

And the official response? We leave it to Indonesia to act. ASEAN non-interference. Very gentlemanly. Very diplomatic. Meanwhile Kuching hasn't seen the sun in a month. Very non-interference indeed - we don't interfere with their right to burn, they don't interfere with our right to cough.

Do you know why it burns so easily? Because we drained it. Indonesia has 24.2 million hectares of peat. Peat is not soil. It's thousands of years of dead leaves and wood soaked in water. It's a giant wet sponge that stores carbon. You drain the water, you plant palm oil, it becomes dry. Then one cigarette, one slash-and-burn clearing, and the whole thing lights up like charcoal. Pantau Gambut said 16.4 million hectares of that peat is now fire-prone. 6 million hectares will flood when it rains. So we made it too dry to live and too wet to live. Genius.

And we gave away 8.3 million hectares of it to 936 companies. We handed them the matches and said please be responsible.

This year they said El Niño made it worse. Hotter, drier. Okay. El Niño is real. But El Niño doesn't own a bulldozer. El Niño doesn't get a permit to clear land. El Niño doesn't decide that 97 to 99 percent of burned areas will never be restored. That's a human decision. Greenpeace checked - after the huge fires from 2015 to 2019, only 1 to 3 percent became forest again. 41 percent became useless shrub. And 54 percent? Became oil palm plantation. Tell me that's not intentional. Tell me with a straight face that the fire just conveniently cleared the forest for the exact crop you wanted to plant. It's like your house burning down and the insurance guy shows up with a construction crew the next morning.

And the cost? We count it in percentages on a Ministry of Health chart. Asthma up 259 percent in Malaysia. Upper respiratory infections up 124 percent. In Indonesia, 4,390 extra hospitalizations. 635,000 severe asthma attacks among children. Children! This year alone. And the long-term study says 33,100 adults die early every year from this PM2.5, plus 2,900 babies. Babies who never smoked, never drove a car, never owned a plantation, but die because someone 500km away wanted cheaper vegetable oil.

And now we have a new frontier. Because Kalimantan and Sumatra are old news. Now it's Papua. South Papua. 1,069 fire points there this year. In Merauke. Inside conservation areas. Places that were supposed to be untouched. Why? Because someone in an office decided Papua will be the new National Strategic Project hub. National Strategic. That phrase always makes me nervous. It means we're about to strategically destroy something nationally.

So what does Greenpeace want? The usual boring things. Stop expanding in vulnerable areas. Revoke permits of companies that destroy peat. Make laws that actually have teeth, including cross-border accountability. So that if your company is registered in KL but your fire is in Sumatra, you cannot pretend you don't know each other.

It's not rocket science. It's common sense. If my cow wanders into your garden and eats your vegetables, I pay. If my smoke wanders into three countries and puts 600,000 kids in the emergency room, I should pay more than a press statement that says "no comment."

Look, at the common men. He/she don't own shares in KLK. I don't have a plantation. They just have lungs. And have kids who asks why the sky is yellow. And they are tired of being told this is complicated. It's not complicated. Someone is burning cheap to plant cheap to sell cheap. And we are paying expensive with our health.

The haze will go away at the end of October, they say. Rains will come. El Niño will go. The AQI will drop from 180 to 80 and everyone will say Praise be to God , thank you rain. We will forget. Until next August. Same script, same smoke, same non-interference. Same satellite counting same fires.

Unless we decide clean air is not a seasonal gift. It's a right.

Nganasegaran (tapessam@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!

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