Friday September 26 1997
Haze
Disaster 'to claim thousands of lives'
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Thousands of people will be killed by the haze
blanketing Southeast Asia, experts warned in Hong
Kong yesterday, adding some regions could face
famine as crops were devastated and livestock
choked to death.
"It's an absolute disaster in health terms," said Hong
Kong University pollution expert Professor
Anthony Hedley, likening the effect of the haze to
all the tens of millions of people in the stricken
region taking up smoking.
"It's not stretching imagination too far to say if you
immerse people in this tremendous pollution . . .
then I think there is nothing more predictable than a
substantial number of premature deaths.
"There are going to be tens of thousands of illnesses
and I don't think we've seen the half of it."
Professor Hedley, head of the university's
community medicine unit, said health effects of the
haze could include chronic bronchitis, emphysema,
diseases of blood vessels in the head and lungs and
cardiovascular disease.
Fang Ming, senior climatology programme manager
at Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, said the haze would destroy the
ecology of the region, while others said it would
devastate food supplies.
Haze
Region forced to pay
for profit-at-any-price
development
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Indonesia's raging forest fires are the result of
profit-at-any-price development in the struggling
country, experts say.
Previously, the fires have been blamed on
slash-and-burn methods adopted by isolated tribes
in some of Indonesia's remotest areas such as
Borneo, Sumatra and Irian Jaya.
At this time of the year, tracts of tropical rainforest
are cleared by small fires to allow the planting of
crops.
For centuries the tribes lived this way, using
methods which preserved the environment,
anthropologists and ecologists say.
However, the inherent dangers of such methods
have increased with massive shifts in population and
become catastrophic when adopted by huge
logging companies.
Traditional slash-and-burn methods are usually only
used to clear two to three hectares of land at the
most.
In most areas, the process is carried out according
to complex rules laid down over generations.
But thanks to Jakarta's official policy of
"transmigration" - displacing people from
overpopulated Java to the outlying islands -
thousands, if not millions, of hectares are now under
threat.
Forestry companies are now often tempted to
resort to burning the forests where they have
already cut down and collected the most valuable
trees.
This method of clearing is the swiftest and less
expensive than the alternatives.
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