August and September mark the peak months for Indonesia's annual outbreak of forest fires.

Freelance journalist Charlie Pye-Smith reports from a trip to Kalimantan this time last year.

It takes around four hours to drive from the port of Banjarmasin to Palangkaraya, the provincial capital of Central Kalimantan, in Indonesian Borneo, and on the way you cross one of the world's great peat swamps. A decade ago it was clothed in dense forest. Now, much of it resembles a First World War battlefield, with blackened trees rising like charred limbs above the slow-burning peat.

According to Sjahrani Sjahrin, head of the provincial Environment Department, most of the fires this year have been caused by villagers living along the recently opened trans-Kalimantan highway. They burn a plot of land, claim ownership, then plant rice and other crops. In many areas the fires have escaped, and penetrated deep into the peat, threatening what remains of the swamp forest.

The acrid, sun-excluding haze which blanketed the region from early August till late October led to the closure of schools and Palangkaraya airport. Frequently visibility was reduced to the width of a street. At times the pollution index reached over 1500, 15 times more than is considered safe, and the hospitals were clogged with people suffering from respiratory problems.

"It's been a bad year," reflects Sjahrin, "but not as bad as 1997/98." Then, during an El Nino-inspired drought, almost 12 million hectares of forest, scrub and grassland were set alight, and haze enveloped huge swathes of Sumatra and Kalimantan, as well as Singapore and Malaysia. At least 75 million people suffered from smoke-related medical problems, and the economic cost of the fires has been put at $3 billion.

The Indonesian government vowed that the country would be much better prepared for the fires next time El Nino struck, as it has this year. Yet the fires have raged again. "Nothing has been done," laments Suwido Limin, director of CIMTROP, the Centre for International Cooperation in Management of Tropical Peatlands, at the University of Palangkaraya. "If the fires continue to burn like this, year after year, there's a real danger we'll lose the remaining peat swamp forest." If that happens, massive quantities of carbon will be released into the atmosphere - the 1997/98 fires accounted for 13-40% of world emissions that year - and a great diversity of wildlife, including a significant portion of Borneo's orang-utans, will be made homeless.

Luca Tacconi of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), based in Java, believes that the lack of progress is partly due to the failure by government to distinguish between fires which matter, and fires which don't. "We need to prioritise and prevent the fires that cause the haze," he says. During 1997/98, 90 per cent of the haze was generated by peat fires. Much the same is true this year.

Since 1998 scientists at CIFOR have been studying the underlying cause of Indonesia's fires, and their research has at least convinced the Indonesian government that it can no longer pin the blame on the old scapegoats, slash-and-burn farmers.

Satellite data suggest that 75 per cent of this year's fire hot spots on the peatlands of Central and West Kalimantan occurred on land managed by plantation companies. Fire is a cheap and efficient way of clearing natural forest prior to establishing crops like oil palm.

Fire is also used by small farmers as a land clearance tool. This is what is happening beside the trans-Kalimantan highway, but blaming the local communities here misses the point. In the mid-1990s, President Suharto initiated the million-hectare Mega Rice Project, which has proved one of the world's great environmental disasters. The forests were plundered for ramin and other valuable trees, and a huge network of canals was built to drain the peat. The locals who have been burning scrubland are simply completing a task begun by central government.

In East Kalimantan local communities use fire to clear the undergrowth in peat swamp forests. This makes it easier to catch highly-prized turtles, and the burning of the peat seems to enhance fishing conditions - in the short term, at least - even if it destroys the forest. As for slash-and-burn farming, it simply isn't an issue according to Tacconi, at least not as far as causing haze is concerned. Most slash-and-burn fires are short-lived and they seldom occur on peat.

If the law was strictly applied, Indonesia would be fire-free: existing legislation, passed in 2001, forbids the use of fires to clear land. "There are two things wrong with the law," says Tacconi. "Nobody takes any notice of it as it is unworkable, and it fails to recognise that some fires - specifically those on peat - cause far more damage and pollution than others."

The solution? Ban all fires on peat, make sure the law is enforced, and introduce measures to rehabilitate degraded peat, says Tacconi. He adds that it is especially important to conserve and protect areas with deep peat.

Suwido Limin's frustration at the consistent failure of the authorities to deal effectively with the annual fires led him to set up his own unit. His meagrely funded fire-fighters - a mix of students and villagers - work 24 hours a day when necessary, sleep in tented camps in remote areas, and sink tube wells to get the water needed to douse the underground fires.

In contrast, says Limin, Forestry Department and Army fire-fighting teams only operate beside the road, where they can be seen, and make no attempt to put out fires unless surface water is available - which it often isn't.

But prevention is better than cure, especially on peat, where large fires are extremely hard to put out. If Borneo's peat swamp forests are to be saved, Limin believes that other measures, besides a change in the law and better enforcement, will be required. "We need to block off some of the canals, and restore the peat to its proper state," he says.
The recent rains have help dampen the fires, but the respite is likely to be short-lived, according to Tacconi. "El Nino continues," he says, "and I think we can expect more big fires, especially in East Kalimantan early next year."