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s the number of hot spots in forest areas is increasing, relevant parties — government, companies and smallholders — have to stop playing the blame game and focus on how to extinguish fires before they spread to other areas and become uncontrollable, experts say.

Susan Page, a professor at the University of Leicester in the UK, said that under such circumstances, close cooperation on the part of all parties was needed to prevent fires from spreading.

“There should be no blame game anymore. The government, the companies and society need to cooperate to prevent the fires from spreading,” Page told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the 15th International Peat Congress in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, on Wednesday.

The number of hot spots in Sumatra increased by 92 to 365 on Wednesday from to the previous day. The majority of hot spots (278) were found in Riau forests, according to the head of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency’s (BMKG) station in Pekanbaru, Slamet Riyadi, as reported by Antara.

In the long run, Indonesia needs a more comprehensive solution to stop the annual forest fires by helping smallholders use more ecologically friendly methods — rather than just burning — to clear their land with the help of the government, the business community and even the international community, said Page, a physical geography professor.

Meanwhile, Khor Yu Leng, a researcher with LMC International, a private company based in Singapore, agreed with Page’s opinion, saying it was not fair to blame smallholders for the annual forest fires because they could not afford the high cost of better land clearance methods.

“The question is who covers the cost? The government could help them by providing a subsidy. The companies could help them by providing land clearance equipment, while international communities could provide them with financial assistance,” Khor said.

Khor, who conducted research on oil palm farmers in Riau, said the palm oil sector would remain an attractive business in coming years because the income was much better than the minimum wage in the province. “More and more people may open businesses in this sector and more problems, like forest fires, will follow,” Khor added.

Meanwhile, Supiandi Sabiham, an expert with the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), said the government needed to closely monitor the implementation of a regulation that allowed communities to clear land by fire if the land measured less than 2 hectares because such fires could spread and become wildfires.