Thick smog has once against descended on Southeast Asia's ultramodern metropolises. In Singapore, the government is telling the elderly and young children to limit their exposure and warning citizens not to engage in strenuous activities outside. In Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian government has been closing airport runways and schools as the tips of skyscrapers disappear inside the dense, greyish white smoke known across the region as the "haze."
The term refers to the byproduct of destructive fires that have helped raze rain forest on the massive island of Sumatra, which is part of the Indonesian archipelago. There, a mix of industrial-scale and small-scale farmers are constantly setting fires to clear forested areas, and peaty wetlands, to plant palm oil or acacia tree plantations. But the problem is these fires often burn out of control, torching neighbouring plots. And when these fires are set on Sumatra's peatland – on which it is impossible to grow palm trees – the earth itself catches fire, burning underground, defying efforts to extinguish it and sending up huge plumes of choking smoke that drift across the region.
This monumental problem reaches well beyond the country's borders: A professor at VU University Amsterdam estimates Indonesia's fires this year have already surpassed the total greenhouse gas emissions of Germany and the burning season, lengthened by an El Nino, is far from over. But why do the fires keep happening?
Last year, curious about the phenomenon, I flew from Jakarta to Pekanbaru, the remote capital of Indonesia's Riau province, which is directly across the Malacca Strait from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and is the centre for Indonesia's palm-oil and pulp-and-paper industries. After driving for hours along winding roads overlooking endless palm oil plantations, we arrived at the small village of Bunga Raya, where weigh-scales and stacked piles of ochre-coloured palm fruit were heaped at the roadside and ripe jackfruit hung above the bouncy, peaty ground. I hopped on the back of a farmer's motorcycle and was driven – down a muddy road, past cassava plants and banana trees – deep into palm-oil country.
We hopped off and met Sakri, a 62-year-old Indonesian farmer who has only one name, like many Indonesians. Sakri and his son harvest a tiny plot of the small, red-and-yellow fruit – that look like Christmas light bulbs – which are sold on to a middleman to be be crushed into the palm oil that eventually goes into hundreds of products, from margarine to lipstick.
Last year, villagers here said, employees on a neighbouring plot of land owned by a large company set fires to clear the land for an industrial oil palm plantation. The fires, the villagers said, eventually burned out of control and destroyed their cash crops of oil palms, as well as their plots of corn, chilis and other vegetables.
"The fires surrounded this whole oil palm plantation," Sakri said. "The whole community was trying to put water on it. We didn't sleep at home. We slept on the oil palm plantations to save them from fires."
This is a smaller tragedy within a larger one. But the complexity of their ordeal helps explain why the fires keep happening. The villagers lay claim to hundreds of acres around their plots, which they said were given to the community in 1978 by the federal government as part of the country's "transmigration" scheme to shift Javanese off Indonesia's populous isle of Java into rural areas in Sumatra. The land was then, apparently, sold to a company by the local government in Riau – where three consecutive governors have been arrested by the country's Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).
Although I could see burnt palm fronds on the ground as the farmers spoke, the company they accused of setting fires told me the firm doesn't own any land nearby. In the capital of Jakarta, obvious corruption is hard enough to nail down and punish. But out here in the hinterland, even if satellite imagery can trace the origins of fires by the smoke, there is too often confusion as to who is responsible – whether it was a large company or small-holders; whether licences were overlapping, outdated or contested. And cash-strapped (or corrupt) local authorities are also slow to act. Despite some arrests, every year the fires burn on.
Indonesia does have a hopeful new president: Joko Widodo, known as a non-corrupt former businessman. But Christopher Bennett, a University of British Columbia adjunct professor who studies Indonesia's forestry sector, said Mr. Widodo has his hands full consolidating political power and sweeping corruption out of Jakarta.
Frustrated by the lack of progress in Indonesia, some in Singapore have tried to tackle the problem themselves. Some of the largest supermarket chains have pulled off their shelves toilet paper that is sourced from Asia Pulp & Paper Group, a giant with plantations on Sumatra accused by Indonesian officials of contributing to the fires. The Association of Banks in Singapore has also issued new guidelines that include measures to consider air pollution and deforestation as members consider corporate financing.
The external pressure may add an extra impetus for Mr. Widodo, but the source of the problem still lies in Indonesia – a place where problems fester more often than they are solved. But even as the fires continue to burn, there is some hope. Agus Sari, a senior member of Indonesia's REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) management agency, outlined a number of new initiatives – and new monitoring technologies – to me when I met him in Jakarta last year.
"There was no battle before," Mr. Sari said. "But it's beginning."