The farmers and tribal people who lined up for government handouts of rice or grain in southern Mindanao this week are sad proof that Southeast Asia’s man-made fires and crippling drought have not only caused an environmental catastrophe but have raised the specter of regionwide famine.
The problem has become so acute and the effects of the fires so disturbing that the United States has offered personnel and technology to help fight forest fires that are expected to burn off and on for months.
The fires already have destroyed 1.9 million acres of forest and left 20 million people exposed to respiratory problems. They are fueled by the worst Asian drought in 50 years.
Since they began last summer, the periodic clouds of drifting ash and smog commonly known as “The Haze” have become as much a part of daily life in the region as the chronic traffic jams, the belching diesel trucks, the stinking open sewage canals and the cardboard and plywood slums.
Trekking down from remote mountain areas, some 200,000 families on Mindanao, the Philippines’ second largest island, have poured into cities over the last week asking for food supplies. Their stocks ran out and new crops have failed on an island that is a major rice- and corn-growing area.
Sixty-four people died in April in remote parts of Mindanao after eating poisonous wild yams.
Fires, drought and heat waves have ruined crops in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. These countries are hard hit by an economic crisis that caused a dramatic devaluation of their currencies. As a consequence, purchases of emergency food from abroad are two or three times more expensive.
As forests burned in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, monsoon rains were delayed or proved inadequate. The result was crop failure from the wetlands of Borneo to the plains of Mindanao and northern Thailand. In some areas farmers have eaten their seed crop.
On the island of Cebu in the Philippines, Gov. Pablo Garcia told his people: “Eat less.”
“We are not talking of famine yet,” said Robert Barnes, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Mindanao. “We’re talking of acute food shortage. But within two months, if it doesn’t rain, we could have a really serious situation.”
Barnes disputed reports that many locals have died of starvation. He said some tribal people in remote areas were eating wild yams and roots from the forest–which are consumed in times of food shortage–without boiling them properly because there was simply no water available. Because of this, some were poisoned.
The prospect of famine is the result of a combination of human-made and natural phenomena that kindled the conflagrations that have blanketed the region periodically for months with a gray cloud of drifting pollution.
For decades Asians have practiced the slash-and-burn method, setting afire logged areas with gasoline to clear them for crop cultivation. The method, popular among subsistence farmers and nomadic settlers, has been used in recent years by large agrarian companies, especially in Indonesia, where President Suharto ordered 2 million acres cleared for food production.
Usually the monsoon rains extinguish the fires. But last year and early this year, the effects of El Nino have kept the rains away.
The result has been that the fires are running amok. Although they are doused temporarily by sporadic rain or firefighters’ efforts, they are rekindled by the lack of heavy downpour to extinguish the peat bogs that continuously smolder below the surface.
“Since the water table is low, the peat bog is not saturated with water. So it burns. And if the monsoon doesn’t come, the peat bog is going to continue to burn and that is what is happening in the Philippines and the rest of the region,” said Tim Wirth, the U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs.
During a visit to Manila earlier this week, Wirth offered U.S. personnel, equipment and technology to help fight the fires.
In East Borneo alone, Indonesia’s environmental-impact agency estimates 600,000 acres of virgin forest went up in smoke over the last six months, and more than 5,000 people in the area suffer from smog-related diseases.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said precious plant species have been wiped out in the region and rare wildlife like the orangutan have either burned to death or are starving.
Malaysia vowed to jail farmers who slash and burn after tens of thousands of acres of forest burned in eastern Sabah state and peat fires crept within miles of Kuala Lumpur, the capital.
Malaysia’s Sarawak and Sabah provinces have been covered in smog and the small Sultanate of Brunei had to close all of its schools after pollution reached hazardous levels.
Environmental agencies in the region concur that of Asia’s original 6 million square miles of forest, only 1.5 million square miles survive today. Each year, logging and conversion to crop plantations destroy another 14,000 square miles of rain forest–an area about the size of Switzerland.
Last year, the fires cost Southeast Asian countries $1.4 billion in lost timber, lost tourism and increased health costs, according to David Glover, the director of Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia.
No country can afford such heavy losses, but most see no remedy in sight.
“These forest fires are like the Energizer Bunny–they keep going and going and going,” said Don Henry, the WWF director for Global Forest Programs.
