STRATEGIC AFFAIRS

Hazy Skies
Geopolitics of Pollution in
Southeast Asia
Itty Abraham

The recent episode of an

oppressive smog that blanketed
Southeast Asia highlights an
entirely new kind of problem
in contemporary international
relations, namely, the complexity
of transnational governance
when traditional remedies
from bombs and missiles at
one extreme, to diplomatic
dmarches and summits on the
more polite endare of no use at
all. Not only is responsibility and
accountability diffuse and spread
across a number of actors
private and public, domestic and
foreignthe presence of nonstate agents confuses standard
diplomatic operating procedures
that are designed to respond to
the predations of other states.

Itty Abraham (itty123@gmail.com) is a scholar

of international relations and nuclear histories
based at the National University of Singapore.

10

fter weeks of grey and brooding

skies above Singapore, a huge
monsoon downpour seems to
have done what at least three affected
countries, multiple official complaints,
numerous threats and counter-accusations
could not. For the first time in months, it
is now possible to glimpse the horizon,
thanks to the temporary lifting of the
oppressive and polluting smog that has
blanketed the region from Sumatra in
the west to Sabah in eastern Borneo, up
to Kuala Lumpur. It is too soon to celebrate, however. The haze, as it is known
colloquially, is far from over. Hundreds
of so-called hotspots, microsites where
fires are still burning, can be seen in
satellite images. Meteorologists have
also warned that, due to the El Nio
effect, the haze could last through the
end of the year and into January 2016.
The haze is the result of hundreds of
small fires burning across Sumatra and
Kalimantan provinces in Indonesia.
These fires are set off by swidden cultivators in the dry season to clear land to
grow palm oil and timber for paper
products. Palm oil is a widely used agroindustrial input, used in industries ranging from food products to shampoo,
with an estimated annual turnover of
$18 billion. The effects of the haze are
multiple and complex. The last time this
happenedalbeit on a smaller scalein
2013, estimates of economic losses in
Malaysia alone ran into billions of dollars. These included losses due to the
decline in tourism and travel, cancellation of business meetings and conventions, extra burden on emergency services and hospitals, and losses in productivity when firms and schools had to
close. The costs in terms of health, especially for children and the elderly, are

considerable and more difficult to estimate as the somatic effects of the haze
may not appear for months, even years.
Apart from costs of these kinds, there
are indirect costs to reputation and confidence, and those other intangibles that
capitalism rarely acknowledges, but that
may be far more important than stock
market indices and quarterly reports.
For example, there was palpable fear
that Singapore would have to cancel its
Formula 1 Grand Prix race in September
2015. Apart from losses of hundreds of
millions of dollars that such a cancellation would have led to, there were not
unreasonable fears that the long-term
effects of the cancellation and the reasons for it would lead, in turn, to a loss in
confidence in Singapore as a global city.
Something similar is argued to have
happened when the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and other transnational public health problems affected
Southeast Asia more than a decade ago.
The difference between then and now is
that SARS affected Southeast Asia disproportionately because of the regions
openness to and dependence on the
global economy; by contrast, todays
haze is very much a regional event with
extra-regional implications.
Geopolitical Fallout
The other fallout of the haze is political.
From the moment the haze cast its smoky
pall over the region, political rhetoric
began to escalate and bilateral tensions
began to rise. Singapore and Malaysia,
on the receiving end of the haze,
demanded that Indonesia accept its
responsibility to end the crisis promptly.
Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla,
who has a reputation for not holding
back, retorted that, rather than carping,
these countries should be pleased that
their air was clean for the remaining 11
months of the year. Other reactions
included the pertinent reminder that
palm oil companies, while based in Indonesia, might in fact be owned by Singaporean and Malaysian concerns.
Indonesia first rejected all forms of
international help and monitoring,
seeking to end the fires on its own. It was

NOVEMBER 28, 2015

vol l no 48

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly

STRATEGIC AFFAIRS

only after a month of effort proved

fruitless that Jokowi, as the countrys
President Joko Widodo D K is known,
acknowledged the limits of what Indonesia
could do and agreed to accept international assistance. In the meantime, the
quality of air in the affected region rose,
on occasion to 400 PSI (pollutant standards index), a level that the World Health
Organization (WHO) deems extremely
hazardous. The WHO recommends that
an affected population retreat indoors,
closing all doors and windows, and desist
from any physical activity. Ironically, this
reliance on numbers in establishing levels
of risk and danger had its own political
fallout, with some refusing to accept the
legitimacy of state-issued data, which
they claimed was systematically understating the extent of the problem. In
other words, the haze also brought into
focus the lack of trust in the state among
domestic publics.
The haze has also shown the limits of
regional mandates produced through the
non-confrontational ASEAN way (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) of
dealing with interstate relations. Over a
decade ago in 2002, ASEAN countries
negotiated a binding agreement on
Transboundary Haze Pollution, designed
to address this very problem. While eight
of the 10 countries in the association had
signed the treaty by 2006, the Philippines only signed it in 2010. It was only
in September 2015 that Indonesia signed
and ratified the treaty. Needless to say,
little has been achieved under the
regional agreement, especially when
compared with bilateral efforts. It is
likely that behind-the-scenes pressure
from more than one regional partner and
the United States must have played a
role in finally getting Indonesia to
sign on.
Trying to understand the nature of
the problem thrown up by the haze is
not easy. Taken to the limit, the haze
could be seen as a form of biological
warfare in its effects, except that it is not
generated deliberately by a hostile state
or political entity. The more commonplace explanation sees it as a negative
externality; the perverse outcome of
hundreds of individual actions, each
perfectly sensible in their own context.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

NOVEMBER 28, 2015

Before we jump to bemoan the haze as

a problem of the commons, however, it is
important to note that this explanation
is also limited. Without the larger context of capitalist production in the form
of agro-industrial plantations, the actions of individual slash-and-burn farmers would not reach the pollution
threshold they have currently. Some of
this land is directly owned or leased
by large multinational corporations. In
other cases, palm oil and paper companies are downstream consumers of the
produce of this land.
Capitalist Political Economy
Either way, the appropriate frame within
which to see the problem is one of a capitalist political economy working across
transnational scales. Neither nation state
nor region is an adequate spatial container within which to grasp the extent
of the problem. It involves at a minimum
tens of thousands of smallholder farmers, corporations both local and global,
regulators from more than one government, transnational environmental nongovernmental organisations, space satellites and technical monitors, not to mention a population of millions, human and
animal, affected by the haze.
Highly affected, Singapore has sought
to use both practical and legal remedies.
It has offered to help train farmers
deploy other modes of land clearing,
inevitably more expensive than slashand-burn, of course, and has sought to
identify the main companies responsible
and hold them to account using a newly
passed haze law. However, it turns out
that it is not always easy to identify
either the owners of the land, or the
owners of the companies involved.
Moreover, it is not clear how far up the
corporate ladder governments will go in
locating responsibility, or if they will
pursue legal remedies against some of
the bigger players, especially if powerful
local interests are involved.
A variety of other strategies are possible. Is the most effective response
demanding that global companies be
responsible for the practices of their
local subcontractors and suppliers? Or,
is a more aggressive strategy the way to
go, namely, to identify key individuals
vol l no 48

and to hold them responsible for actions

that corporations take? Or, should consumer boycotts and shaming techniques
be used to make clear that the public will
not stand for corporate behaviour that
ends up creating an environmental and
public health crisis? It is worth noting
that the list of everyday items that use palm
oil as an ingredient would make guiltfree shopping a rather complex activity.
A New Kind of Problem
Regardless of the strategies used, the
haze highlights an entirely new kind of
problem in contemporary international
relations, namely, the complexity of
transnational governance when traditional remediesfrom bombs and
missiles at one extreme, to diplomatic
dmarches and summits on the more
polite endare of no use at all. Not only
is responsibility and accountability diffuse and spread across a number of
actorsprivate and public, domestic and
foreignthe presence of non-state agents
confuses standard diplomatic operating
procedures that are designed to respond
to the predations of other states. Much
as some of us may want to, we do not
know how to indict everyday capitalism
in the International Criminal Court.
Many of these problems recur in the
negotiations over climate change. Even
when states are willing to make concessions and reduce emissions, it is not
always clear where to look and who to
regulate. For small and weak countries
that are on the receiving end of another
countrys pollution, the situation is even
more frustrating. At least in the case of
the Marshall Islands and nuclear testing
we knew where to point the finger. With
the haze, neither the nature of the problem nor its obvious cause is clear. That is
why the international community is still
working on the defences against it.

available at

Life Book House

Shop No 7, Masjid Betul
Mukarram Subji Mandi Road
Bhopal 462 001
Madhya Pradesh
Ph: 2740705
11