Haze

As I type this, the PSI is 140, the stench of something burning hangs in the air, and mediacorp even put a little PSI indicator on the top left of my TV... visibility this afternoon was less than 1km, I couldn't even see the start of Changi runway 02L from PIE...

Blame it on the wind blowing in from Sumatra, and blame it on the slash-and-burn subsistence farmers in Sumatra who practically live hand-to-mouth. But u can't change the weather, and these farmers don't know the consequences of this traditional practice passed down for generations. In the first place, they wouldn't be there if they had better jobs. But many a time these "better jobs" entail moving into crowded, unsanitary and unpleasant squatters - and their lives will be no better.

I tell you who to blame... Bambang and his squad of inept, corrupt officials, and all their predecessors (i'm not saying all are corrupt and inept, but that there are sufficient corrupt and inept ones to pull down the whole system). While gleaming skyscrapers greet any visitor to Jakarta, look harder and you'll find poverty and misery - from the garbage-scavenging slum-dweller to menial labourer. While the economy has grown 5.6% in 2005, this has benefitted only the upper strata of society and perhaps a much squeezed middle class. Contrast Indonesia's many millionaires with the 27.1% of its population living below the population living below the poverty line, and you'll soon see a textbook example of extreme polarization. Inflation skyrocketed during the Asian Financial Crisis, and has recently dropped to a still-astonishing 17.1% in 2005 - and as we all know, inflation affects the poor consumer the worst, and not the multi-millionaires whose cash is happily stowed away in foreign currencies. Add to that corruption, which hinders economic development in favour of self-gain, diverting funds meant for the poor and the poor's welfare (eg education in rural areas) to the pockets of greedy officials - as they say, a large potion of foreign direct aid during the 2006 Boxing Day tsunami "disappeared".

So you have a pack of poor subsistence farmers, given poor educational opportunities, and poor job options, that simply have no other way to survive but slash and burn... Little political will exists to make them aware of the severe ramifications of slash and burn, and to implement and enforce legislation against slash and burn farming while at the same time providing these farmers a way out (lamentably, it is not the interest of any populist politican to invoke change against their traditional way of life...such is the self-annhilatory nature of democracy)... and this forms a potent molotov cocktail; haze becomes a fait accompli. All it then takes is the right weather conditions (a dry spell and winds blowing NE - e.g. La Nina, occuring every few years) to detonate this molotov cocktail, spelling PSI-140s for Singapore and Malaysia, and hopefully a wake up call for Bambang to stop NATO-ing about his "vision for change" and get down and dirty