Preface

Summary

I was twelve when, first in my lifetime, I was told to put on a white dust mask before stepping out of the house. A thick haze blanket shimmered across my hometown, Penang, blocking the sun's rays from reaching the surface. It was 1997, and the particle-laden air persisted for months. As I was told, the source of this greyish matter came from the land fires in Indonesia. The reason for the fires was reduced to a set of clichés in the understanding of the general public in Malaysia: the fire was set by the “irresponsible” farmers in Indonesia who used fire to clear forest land for farming. Interestingly, the region was experiencing drastic changes at the same time—in both financial and political landscapes. The most significant change would be the fall of Suharto's dictatorship following the financial crisis in 1998.

I was twenty-eight when I made my first trip to Central Kalimantan as a junior researcher at Utrecht University, working on a research project called “Large-scale Investment in Food, Fibre, and Energy: Options for the Poor”. Central Kalimantan is one of the most affected areas that generate massive haze during prolonged, severe droughts. With a local friend, Pak Agustinus, we rode across the province on a motorbike and went deep into the mountains, forests, plantations, and gold mining sites on large rivers and small streams. In these few months, I met a wide range of people, including indigenous people, migrants from other islands, urban settlers, local officials, entrepreneurs, activists, and plantation workers. I was, however, struggling to put all the pictures together—there are no simple ways of framing the fire events with complex on-ground socio-economic dynamics. While many uncontrolled fires were made unintentionally (such as a carelessly discarded cigarette butt), there were also reports about massive fires set purposely for land clearing. Ironically, many oil palm companies operating in these fireprone areas are owned by Malaysians and have close patronage relationships with the government, if not actually government-linked.

Coincidentally, in later years I was involved in several projects related to agriculture and forestry in both Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo in different capacities, including policy design, industrial development, and research.