In Indonesia, land is burned seasonally to clear it for agriculture, and particularly for palm plantations which supply cooking oil used throughout Asia. Burning vegetation creates a smoky mess in the best of times (I have personal experience with this in Thailand), but what makes it much, much worse in Indonesia is the presence of organic soils that can also catch on fire and create an unbelievable amount of smoke. My family and I, including a newborn at the time, were exposed to this in Singapore in 2013, and we couldn’t see neighboring buildings out the window (buildings are close together in Singapore) when it was at its worst. 2013 was a bad year, but there have been even worse ones since then.
The media tends to blame the situation on small-scale farmers who are ignorant of modern practices. That might be part of the issue, but there are also huge international investors driving this trend to make profits on the palm oil, including investors in Singapore where the government routinely complains about “trans-boundary haze”.
This is a crisis of vast proportions – Greenpeace Indonesia identified a total burned area of 600,000 hectares of peatland last year. Indonesia’s fire toll during the severely dry years of 2015 and 2019 was even worse, at times emitting more carbon in a day than the entire U.S. economy did, according to the World Resources Institute. The dense haze emitted from these peatland fires contains smoke particles microscopic enough to travel from the lungs into the bloodstream, causing stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma. A 2022 university study calculated that pollution from peatland fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan during the five years from 2013 caused annual premature deaths of about 33,100 adults and 2,900 infants along with thousands of hospital admissions and severe asthma cases in children.
In tracing the finances that flow to Indonesia’s fire-plagued plantation giants, one name that frequently surfaces is the Sinar Mas Group. Connected to many pulpwood plantations with the largest burned areas in Indonesia, the total burned area across all Sinar Mas linked pulp concessions was 314,200 hectares during 2015–2019.
Independent analyst Profundo, a research organization specializing in financial and corporate analysis, traced the funds received by Sinar Mas’s numerous companies from 2015 to 2023. In total, according to Profundo’s findings, the group’s companies obtained approximately $40 billion in credit deals from global financial institutions, with major creditors from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. In terms of shareholdings, investors from the United States have put $504 million into Sinar Mas Group since 2022, alongside investors from the United Kingdom, Norway, and the EU with shareholdings worth $407 million.
You read that right – more carbon emissions on a bad day than the U.S. economy, which I think is still the world’s largest emitter! And the ecological destruction and air pollution would be horrific enough without the carbon emissions on top. This is one of the biggest issues in the world that doesn’t get much attention (a general pattern for Indonesia, which I have also said is the world’s largest and most important country that at least the U.S. general public has barely even heard of.) The palm oil is a useful product though that the region is not about to give up (this would be like the U.S. giving up, I don’t know, french fries?) so the solution has to be using better agricultural practices to reduce the impact, and this of course might lower profits for rich and powerful people and/or raise prices for consumers.