Land-burning fines unpaid years after fires
JAKARTA: Indonesian plantation companies fined for burning huge areas of land since 2009 have failed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties meant to hold them accountable for actions that took a devastating environmental and human toll.
The palm oil and pulp wood companies involved in fires owe over US$220mil (RM895.5mil) in fines and the figure for unpaid penalties for environmental destruction swells to US$1.3bil (RM5.3bil) when an illegal logging case from 2013 is included, according to separate summaries of the cases compiled by Greenpeace and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
Indonesia’s annual dry season fires were particularly disastrous in 2015, burning 2.6 million ha of land and spreading health-damaging haze across Indonesia, Singapore, southern Thailand and Malaysia.
The World Bank estimated that the fires cost Indonesia US$16bil (RM65bil). A Harvard and Columbia study estimated that the haze hastened 100,000 deaths in the region.
President Joko Widodo and other senior officials vowed action, but repeated legal appeals by the 10 companies taken to court by the environment ministry have dragged the cases out for years.
The ministry has issued statements trumpeting progress in sanctioning companies involved in land fires.
But the two companies mentioned in those statements that have paid fines totalling $2mil (RM8.1mil) involved environmental damage from open cast mining, not fires, said the ministry’s law enforcement director-general Rasio Ridho Sani.
Greenpeace Indonesia said the unpaid fines are money owed to the Indonesian people that could pay for large-scale forest restoration and for health and emergency infrastructure for when the fires strike again.
“By not enforcing these laws, the government is sending a dangerous message: Company profit comes before law, clean air, health and forest protection,” forests campaigner Arie Rompas said on Friday.
In a case that cited fires between 2009 and 2012, palm oil company Kallista Alam appealed its 336 billion rupiah (RM97mil) fine all the way to the Supreme Court and then sought a judicial review of the Supreme Court decision against it.
Fires intentionally set by the company in 2012 to clear land for palm oil tore through the Tripa peat swamp in Aceh on Sumatra island, killing wildlife and blanketing surrounding areas in a thick haze.
Tripa is part of the 2.6 million ha Leuser national park, the last place in the world where endangered Sumatran orangutans, tigers, elephants and rhinos share the same wild environment.
“As citizens, if we don’t pay our taxes we get sent to prison,” said Rompas. “So, why aren’t the owners of these big companies being forced to pay what they owe or sent to prison if they don’t pay?”