E

nvironment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar has demanded that the private sector help curb forest fires which have resulted in health issues and economic losses for people in the regions.

Siti said that peatland, especially in Riau, was easily burned, making it important for land owners, including plantation companies, to make efforts to prevent fires.

'€œRiau is the worst since there is a lot of peatland. Thus, we want the private sector to share the responsibility [to prevent fires], such as by channeling water to dry peat,'€ she said on Sunday as quoted by detik.com.

She also demanded that local administrations, the police and land owners keep a close watch.

'€œ[Land owners] should monitor their territory,'€ she said.

While Java island has entered rainy season, Riau on Sumatra island has been dry for about a month, triggering fires in dry areas of Bengkalis and other areas in the province.

Riau is known as the area with the most hotspots in the country, which has produced haze resulting in hundreds of people from Indonesia and neighboring countries like Singapore and Malaysia experiencing respiratory problems.

The province was also the first to be subject to a government compliance audit on local administrations and agroforestry companies last year, since 93.6 percent of the 12,541 hotspots recorded between Jan. 2 and March 13, 2014 were located in Riau.

The audit found that most local administrations and companies in the province did not follow proper procedures in conducting business related to forests, which was suspected as being a major cause of fires.

The poor commitment of the private sector has also been shown by companies that have failed to deliver on zero-deforestation pledges.

One example is Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL), Indonesia'€™s second-largest pulp and paper producer.

'€œIn January 2014, APRIL published a new Sustainable Forest Management Plan [SFMP]. Unlike the commitment made the previous year by Asia Pulp & Paper [APP] '€” Indonesia'€™s other major pulp and paper producer '€” APRIL'€™s new policy was not a commitment to protect all natural forest and peatland,'€ Greenpeace International said in a statement.

According to Greenpeace, the plan largely only restated older commitments that the company had failed to meet in the past.

Furthermore, the company has still failed to address the deficiencies of the new policy and, along with its suppliers, has repeatedly broken the commitments made in the new policy.

'€œIn August 2014, APRIL'€™s Stakeholder Advisory Committee commissioned [audit company] KPMG to report on APRIL'€™s progress against its commitments. The KPMG audit found that not a single concession complied with the policy,'€ the statement said.

APRIL conservation director Petrus Gunarso denied the accusations, saying that the company was fully committed to conserving the environment.

'€œWhat we mean by Sustainable Forest Management Plan is a long-term plan. But we have finished cutting down the trees in our concessions. It stopped in December 2014. And now we are replanting them,'€ he told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

However, even if the company and its long-term suppliers stopped clearing rainforest at the end of 2014, it had given itself until the end of 2019 to continue using rainforest fibre sourced from so-called short-term suppliers, Greenpeace said.

Petrus said that buying timber from short-term suppliers was a better option.

'€œIf someone builds a plantation, where do they throw the logs away? Rather than letting the logs be burned or destroyed, it'€™s better for us to buy them,'€ he said.

Another criticism leveled against APRIL is the fact that it has yet to adopt the High Carbon Stock (HCS) approach to forest protection.

'€œIf the HCS approach is applied across the board to all industries, then we will comply. But if it only applies to one company, then it'€™s not right,'€ Petrus said.