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Slash and burn and fires in Indonesia: A comment
Ecological Economics 56 (2006) 1 – 4 www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon
Letter to the Editor
Slash and burn and fires in Indonesia: A comment Luca Tacconi a,b,*, Andrew P. Vayda c a Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia c Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
b
Received 22 February 2005; accepted 2 March 2005 Available online 9 August 2005
Abstract A paper published in Ecological Economics [Varma, A. 2003. The economics of slash and burn: a case study of the 1997– 1998 Indonesian forest fires. Ecological Economics 46,159–171] claims to show that slash and burn agriculture is socially inefficient and should be banned. However, its conclusions and recommendations are flawed. It defines slash and burn agriculture too broadly and misrepresents the nature and causes of the 1997–98 fires by virtue of attributing them entirely to slash and burn agriculture. Its economic assessment of the costs of the fires is also problematic. The recommendations to ban land-clearing fires and to provide alternative livelihoods to slash and burn farmers cannot be supported. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Slash and burn agriculture; Fire; Indonesia
1. Introduction Varma (2003) studies the economics of the 1997– 98 fires in Indonesia to assess the efficiency of slash and burn agriculture: it finds slash and burn dto be highly inefficient from a social perspectiveT (p. 168). Unfortunately, the conclusions of the paper are flawed because: a) By applying the single diagnostic of the use of fire to clear land, it lumps together as dslash and burn * Corresponding author. Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Tel.: +61 2 61257554; fax: +61 2 61258448. E-mail address: [email protected] (L. Tacconi). 0921-8009/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.03.034
agricultureT everything from traditional shifting cultivation of small plots in the forest to largescale and permanent plantation agriculture. b) By attributing the 1997–98 fires entirely to slash and burn agriculture, it misrepresents the nature and causes of the fires. We address these issues in turn before discussing the economics of fires in Indonesia and Varma’s (2003) assessment of the costs of fires. Finally, we turn to the recommendations. Our comments are based on our previous research and writing on fires in Indonesia. The information presented here is derived from Vayda (1999, in press) and Tacconi (2003), unless otherwise stated.
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L. Tacconi, A.P. Vayda / Ecological Economics 56 (2006) 1–4
2. Slash and burn agriculture For Varma, any agriculture involving the use of fire to clear land falls under his bslash-and-burnQ rubric. This conflates diverse agricultural systems, ranging from those in which land is cleared for large commercial plantations to those in which traditional shifting cultivators clear land for small swidden plots that are cropped for only one, two, or a few years before being allowed to revert to forest. Minimizing land-clearing costs and restoring soil fertility with the ash from burnt vegetation, the two benefits of burning which are taken into account by Varma (2003 p. 168), accrue to the practitioners of all these systems. However, Varma’s failure to make distinctions among the systems obscures important variations in the costs and benefits of burning. Thus, the alternatives of mechanical landclearing which Varma (2003 p. 168) mentions are much less affordable or available to shifting cultivators and other small farmers than to large-plantation concessionaires. There is variation also in recourse to measures and rules to prevent the spread of land-clearing fires. Research has indicated that such measures and rules, obviating costs that Varma incorrectly regards as invariably resulting from burning, are more likely to be adopted by farmers if their livelihoods depend on commercially valuable tree crops needing to be protected from fire.
3. The nature and causes of the Indonesian fires Varma (2003 p. 160) claims that dslash and burn, coupled with the unusually dry weather conditions brought about by the El Nin˜o climate effect, generated forest fires that destroyed millions of hectares of landT. The 1997–98 fires affected agricultural lands, plantations, forests, and peatlands. The fires that appeared to be most significant from an ecological and economic perspective were those that affected forests and peatlands. Forest fires resulted in losses of commercial timber and biodiversity values. Peatland fires may have contributed between 60% and 90% of the emissions resulting in smoke-haze pollution and they were also the major source of carbon emissions. The smoke-haze affecting Southeast Asia resulted in significant economic costs, such as health
costs, loss of agricultural and industrial production, and loss of tourism income. Whatever the actual contribution of various possible ignition sources for the large-scale fires, it is important to note that the sources include ignitions not only for clearing land for agriculture but also for the following: i) arson; ii) cooking and insect-repelling fires and campfires set within forests by loggers and others; iii) fires to clear vegetation so as to facilitate access to such commercially valuable resources as Borneo ironwood trees and, in some Kalimantan swamp forests, exportable turtles; and iv) illuminant fires set to facilitate changing tires or making other repairs to vehicles along forest roads at night. In addition, unextinguished cigarette butts and, at least in Kalimantan, underground coal seams extending to or near ground surface have been described as possible ignition sources. Contrary to Varma’s unquestioning assumption, there are no data available on the efficacy and relative frequency with which any particular type of ignition event leads to forest fires. The forensic fire investigations used in other countries to ascertain the sources of wildland fires have hardly been conducted in Indonesia. In fact, except for some of the peatland fires mentioned below, not a single case of clear evidence for the ignition source of a wildfire in Indonesia’s primary forests is known to us. Moreover, for both explaining the fires and formulating policies to control them, Varma’s recognition only of ignitions as anthropogenic causes of forest fires is problematic insofar as it diverts attention from such other causes as the predatory logging that has resulted in changes in forest microclimates, forest fuel loads, and forest-fuel moisture content and has thus made Indonesian forests more susceptible to fire. In 1997, an El Nin˜o Southern Oscillation (ENSO) year, the main contributors to the smoke-haze pollution that affected Singapore and mainland Malaysia, as well as Sumatra itself, were fires in the peatlands of Sumatra’s Jambi, Riau, and South Sumatra provinces, mainly due to land clearing for oil palm and timber plantations and, in the South Sumatran wetlands, also due, to a yet unclear degree, to livelihood activities. In non-ENSO years, land clearing for plantations on peatlands appears to be the main source of smoke-haze. In 1997, peatland fires in the area of the governmentinitiated One Million Hectare Rice Project in Central Kalimantan apparently were the main source of smoke
L. Tacconi, A.P. Vayda / Ecological Economics 56 (2006) 1–4
haze in Kalimantan and also affected Sarawak state, Malaysia. In West Kalimantan in 1997, extensive burning, probably for land clearing in oil palm and timber plantations in peat areas as well as for local livelihood activities, contributed to smoke-haze pollution in West Kalimantan and Sarawak. In January– April 1998, both the fires in the Central Mahakam Lakes area (East Kalimantan province), apparently for clearing vegetation to facilitate resource exploitation, and the large-scale fires in other parts of East Kalimantan contributed to smoke-haze pollution in the province. These fires did not result in significant transboundary pollution. It is obvious that true slash and burn agriculture provided only one of the ignition sources of fires, and possibly not the most significant. This would be sufficient to invalidate the economic assessment of the social efficiency of slash and burn presented by Varma (2003).
4. The methodology of the economic assessment First, Varma (2003) does not present the quantitative data used to calculate the economic costs of the fires, such as volume and price of timber burnt per hectare, value of agricultural production lost per hectare, prices used to estimate the losses of indirect use and non use values (e.g. recreational benefits and global warming). This is a serious shortcoming because the appropriateness of the assumptions made cannot be assessed. Second, Varma (2003) assumes that fires necessarily lead to the loss of several forest functions, such as water regulation, erosion control, and biological control. There is no evidence that this has or may have happened. For instance, in relation to soil erosion, conclusions from research in East Kalimantan are that soil erosion after fires was not high (Sudarmadji, 2001), there is no evidence that significant siltation occurred, and there were no significant infrastructures like dams, downstream from the fires, that were significantly affected by siltation. While in some cases the (partial) removal of forests may result in economic costs, this cannot be assumed a priori. Studies considering the economic costs and benefits of forest cover change need to be grounded in biophysical evidence. These are two of the reasons for which we find it impossible to accept Varma’s estimate of $20.1 billion
3
for the costs of fires. For a revised burnt area twice the size of that assumed by Varma, these costs have been estimated at a maximum of $6.3 billion (Tacconi, 2003).
5. Conclusion The paper by Varma (2003) does not show that the social costs of the use of fire in slash and burn agriculture outweigh its benefits. A detailed assessment of the real costs and benefits of land-clearing fires as employed in specific and different agricultural systems would be needed to determine whether aid agencies should attempt to provide alternatives to their use in any of the systems. Fires do of course have significant costs and the fires need to be dealt with. However, categorical banning of land-clearing fires and replacing them with mechanical land clearing by a government agency are not the ways ahead. Apart from the fact that carrying out this task over the entire country would be beyond the capacity of any government agency and would result in significant economic inefficiencies, there is the fact that our knowledge of ignition sources for Indonesian forest fires is insufficient for us to have any confidence that forest fires would not start from other sources even in the highly unlikely event of the elimination of land-clearing fires. Detailed policy options have been discussed elsewhere (Tacconi, 2003) and cannot be presented here due to space limitations. It suffices to say that fires should be allowed where and when the environmental conditions are appropriate (e.g. not in deep peat areas), as they do not necessarily result in environmental costs. Appropriate law enforcement should ensure that fire management regulations are followed, particularly by plantation companies that are responsible for clearing large areas.
References Sudarmadji, T., 2001. Impact of logging and forest fires on soil erosion in tropical humid forest in East Kalimantan. In: Kobayashi, S., Turnbull, J.W., Toma, T., Mori, T., Majid, N.M.N.A. (Eds.), Rehabilitation of Degraded Tropical Forest Ecosystems. Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, pp. 35 – 44.
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L. Tacconi, A.P. Vayda / Ecological Economics 56 (2006) 1–4
Tacconi, L., 2003. Fires in Indonesia: Causes, Costs and Policy Implications. Occasional Paper No 38. Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor. (http://www.cifor.org/publications/ pdf_files/OccPapers/OP-038.pdf). Varma, A., 2003. The economics of slash and burn: a case study of the 1997–1998 Indonesian forest fires. Ecological Economics 46, 159 – 171.
Vayda, A.P., 1999. Finding Causes of the 1997–98 Indonesian Forest Fires: Problems and Possibilities. World Wide Fund for Nature-Indonesia Programme, Jakarta. Vayda, A.P., in press. Causal explanation of Indonesian forest fires: the need for conceptual distinctions. Human Ecology.
Letter to the Editor
Slash and burn and fires in Indonesia: A comment Luca Tacconi a,b,*, Andrew P. Vayda c a Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia c Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
b
Received 22 February 2005; accepted 2 March 2005 Available online 9 August 2005
Abstract A paper published in Ecological Economics [Varma, A. 2003. The economics of slash and burn: a case study of the 1997– 1998 Indonesian forest fires. Ecological Economics 46,159–171] claims to show that slash and burn agriculture is socially inefficient and should be banned. However, its conclusions and recommendations are flawed. It defines slash and burn agriculture too broadly and misrepresents the nature and causes of the 1997–98 fires by virtue of attributing them entirely to slash and burn agriculture. Its economic assessment of the costs of the fires is also problematic. The recommendations to ban land-clearing fires and to provide alternative livelihoods to slash and burn farmers cannot be supported. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Slash and burn agriculture; Fire; Indonesia
1. Introduction Varma (2003) studies the economics of the 1997– 98 fires in Indonesia to assess the efficiency of slash and burn agriculture: it finds slash and burn dto be highly inefficient from a social perspectiveT (p. 168). Unfortunately, the conclusions of the paper are flawed because: a) By applying the single diagnostic of the use of fire to clear land, it lumps together as dslash and burn * Corresponding author. Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Tel.: +61 2 61257554; fax: +61 2 61258448. E-mail address: [email protected] (L. Tacconi). 0921-8009/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.03.034
agricultureT everything from traditional shifting cultivation of small plots in the forest to largescale and permanent plantation agriculture. b) By attributing the 1997–98 fires entirely to slash and burn agriculture, it misrepresents the nature and causes of the fires. We address these issues in turn before discussing the economics of fires in Indonesia and Varma’s (2003) assessment of the costs of fires. Finally, we turn to the recommendations. Our comments are based on our previous research and writing on fires in Indonesia. The information presented here is derived from Vayda (1999, in press) and Tacconi (2003), unless otherwise stated.
2
L. Tacconi, A.P. Vayda / Ecological Economics 56 (2006) 1–4
2. Slash and burn agriculture For Varma, any agriculture involving the use of fire to clear land falls under his bslash-and-burnQ rubric. This conflates diverse agricultural systems, ranging from those in which land is cleared for large commercial plantations to those in which traditional shifting cultivators clear land for small swidden plots that are cropped for only one, two, or a few years before being allowed to revert to forest. Minimizing land-clearing costs and restoring soil fertility with the ash from burnt vegetation, the two benefits of burning which are taken into account by Varma (2003 p. 168), accrue to the practitioners of all these systems. However, Varma’s failure to make distinctions among the systems obscures important variations in the costs and benefits of burning. Thus, the alternatives of mechanical landclearing which Varma (2003 p. 168) mentions are much less affordable or available to shifting cultivators and other small farmers than to large-plantation concessionaires. There is variation also in recourse to measures and rules to prevent the spread of land-clearing fires. Research has indicated that such measures and rules, obviating costs that Varma incorrectly regards as invariably resulting from burning, are more likely to be adopted by farmers if their livelihoods depend on commercially valuable tree crops needing to be protected from fire.
3. The nature and causes of the Indonesian fires Varma (2003 p. 160) claims that dslash and burn, coupled with the unusually dry weather conditions brought about by the El Nin˜o climate effect, generated forest fires that destroyed millions of hectares of landT. The 1997–98 fires affected agricultural lands, plantations, forests, and peatlands. The fires that appeared to be most significant from an ecological and economic perspective were those that affected forests and peatlands. Forest fires resulted in losses of commercial timber and biodiversity values. Peatland fires may have contributed between 60% and 90% of the emissions resulting in smoke-haze pollution and they were also the major source of carbon emissions. The smoke-haze affecting Southeast Asia resulted in significant economic costs, such as health
costs, loss of agricultural and industrial production, and loss of tourism income. Whatever the actual contribution of various possible ignition sources for the large-scale fires, it is important to note that the sources include ignitions not only for clearing land for agriculture but also for the following: i) arson; ii) cooking and insect-repelling fires and campfires set within forests by loggers and others; iii) fires to clear vegetation so as to facilitate access to such commercially valuable resources as Borneo ironwood trees and, in some Kalimantan swamp forests, exportable turtles; and iv) illuminant fires set to facilitate changing tires or making other repairs to vehicles along forest roads at night. In addition, unextinguished cigarette butts and, at least in Kalimantan, underground coal seams extending to or near ground surface have been described as possible ignition sources. Contrary to Varma’s unquestioning assumption, there are no data available on the efficacy and relative frequency with which any particular type of ignition event leads to forest fires. The forensic fire investigations used in other countries to ascertain the sources of wildland fires have hardly been conducted in Indonesia. In fact, except for some of the peatland fires mentioned below, not a single case of clear evidence for the ignition source of a wildfire in Indonesia’s primary forests is known to us. Moreover, for both explaining the fires and formulating policies to control them, Varma’s recognition only of ignitions as anthropogenic causes of forest fires is problematic insofar as it diverts attention from such other causes as the predatory logging that has resulted in changes in forest microclimates, forest fuel loads, and forest-fuel moisture content and has thus made Indonesian forests more susceptible to fire. In 1997, an El Nin˜o Southern Oscillation (ENSO) year, the main contributors to the smoke-haze pollution that affected Singapore and mainland Malaysia, as well as Sumatra itself, were fires in the peatlands of Sumatra’s Jambi, Riau, and South Sumatra provinces, mainly due to land clearing for oil palm and timber plantations and, in the South Sumatran wetlands, also due, to a yet unclear degree, to livelihood activities. In non-ENSO years, land clearing for plantations on peatlands appears to be the main source of smoke-haze. In 1997, peatland fires in the area of the governmentinitiated One Million Hectare Rice Project in Central Kalimantan apparently were the main source of smoke
L. Tacconi, A.P. Vayda / Ecological Economics 56 (2006) 1–4
haze in Kalimantan and also affected Sarawak state, Malaysia. In West Kalimantan in 1997, extensive burning, probably for land clearing in oil palm and timber plantations in peat areas as well as for local livelihood activities, contributed to smoke-haze pollution in West Kalimantan and Sarawak. In January– April 1998, both the fires in the Central Mahakam Lakes area (East Kalimantan province), apparently for clearing vegetation to facilitate resource exploitation, and the large-scale fires in other parts of East Kalimantan contributed to smoke-haze pollution in the province. These fires did not result in significant transboundary pollution. It is obvious that true slash and burn agriculture provided only one of the ignition sources of fires, and possibly not the most significant. This would be sufficient to invalidate the economic assessment of the social efficiency of slash and burn presented by Varma (2003).
4. The methodology of the economic assessment First, Varma (2003) does not present the quantitative data used to calculate the economic costs of the fires, such as volume and price of timber burnt per hectare, value of agricultural production lost per hectare, prices used to estimate the losses of indirect use and non use values (e.g. recreational benefits and global warming). This is a serious shortcoming because the appropriateness of the assumptions made cannot be assessed. Second, Varma (2003) assumes that fires necessarily lead to the loss of several forest functions, such as water regulation, erosion control, and biological control. There is no evidence that this has or may have happened. For instance, in relation to soil erosion, conclusions from research in East Kalimantan are that soil erosion after fires was not high (Sudarmadji, 2001), there is no evidence that significant siltation occurred, and there were no significant infrastructures like dams, downstream from the fires, that were significantly affected by siltation. While in some cases the (partial) removal of forests may result in economic costs, this cannot be assumed a priori. Studies considering the economic costs and benefits of forest cover change need to be grounded in biophysical evidence. These are two of the reasons for which we find it impossible to accept Varma’s estimate of $20.1 billion
3
for the costs of fires. For a revised burnt area twice the size of that assumed by Varma, these costs have been estimated at a maximum of $6.3 billion (Tacconi, 2003).
5. Conclusion The paper by Varma (2003) does not show that the social costs of the use of fire in slash and burn agriculture outweigh its benefits. A detailed assessment of the real costs and benefits of land-clearing fires as employed in specific and different agricultural systems would be needed to determine whether aid agencies should attempt to provide alternatives to their use in any of the systems. Fires do of course have significant costs and the fires need to be dealt with. However, categorical banning of land-clearing fires and replacing them with mechanical land clearing by a government agency are not the ways ahead. Apart from the fact that carrying out this task over the entire country would be beyond the capacity of any government agency and would result in significant economic inefficiencies, there is the fact that our knowledge of ignition sources for Indonesian forest fires is insufficient for us to have any confidence that forest fires would not start from other sources even in the highly unlikely event of the elimination of land-clearing fires. Detailed policy options have been discussed elsewhere (Tacconi, 2003) and cannot be presented here due to space limitations. It suffices to say that fires should be allowed where and when the environmental conditions are appropriate (e.g. not in deep peat areas), as they do not necessarily result in environmental costs. Appropriate law enforcement should ensure that fire management regulations are followed, particularly by plantation companies that are responsible for clearing large areas.
References Sudarmadji, T., 2001. Impact of logging and forest fires on soil erosion in tropical humid forest in East Kalimantan. In: Kobayashi, S., Turnbull, J.W., Toma, T., Mori, T., Majid, N.M.N.A. (Eds.), Rehabilitation of Degraded Tropical Forest Ecosystems. Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, pp. 35 – 44.
4
L. Tacconi, A.P. Vayda / Ecological Economics 56 (2006) 1–4
Tacconi, L., 2003. Fires in Indonesia: Causes, Costs and Policy Implications. Occasional Paper No 38. Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor. (http://www.cifor.org/publications/ pdf_files/OccPapers/OP-038.pdf). Varma, A., 2003. The economics of slash and burn: a case study of the 1997–1998 Indonesian forest fires. Ecological Economics 46, 159 – 171.
Vayda, A.P., 1999. Finding Causes of the 1997–98 Indonesian Forest Fires: Problems and Possibilities. World Wide Fund for Nature-Indonesia Programme, Jakarta. Vayda, A.P., in press. Causal explanation of Indonesian forest fires: the need for conceptual distinctions. Human Ecology.