BY DOUG COOPER
SYDNEY, Australia - Beneath the pall of choking smog blanketing more than half of Southeast Asia lie devastating human and social consequences that threaten the health, lives, and livelihoods of tens of millions of workers and peasants.

For two months, increasing parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines have been affected by life-threatening levels of pollution caused by thousands of out-of-control forest fires. Indonesian officials concede that smog levels are so high in some areas as to be impossible to measure with normal testing equipment.

Far from a "natural" disaster, the fires were deliberately set by capitalist corporations to clear land cheaply for rubber, palm oil, and timber plantations in vast parts of the islands of Sumatra, Java, and the Indonesian parts of Borneo and New Guinea -as they have been doing since the early 1980s. Seasonal monsoon rains normally extinguish the fires, with notable exceptions in 1982-83 and 1994. Now, once again, the wet season has still not come and is not expected until November. Some 1.5 million acres of forest have already been destroyed.

Despite a law passed after the 1994 devastation that made burning off land illegal, the companies have so far acted with impunity. The ruling Suharto family regime in Indonesia has close ties to those directly responsible for flouting the law. And the government has been forced to admit that it had been warned that the dry season would be prolonged.

At least four people have died of heart or respiratory failure and tens of thousands have sought hospital treatment in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Many more have no access to hospitals, because they are already full or nonexistent.

Poor visibility is the likely cause of Indonesia's worst air disaster on September 26, when 234 people died in a crash of a Garuda jet near the city of Medan. It is also the suspected cause of a collision the same day of two freighters - with 29 crew members missing and presumed dead - in the Strait of Malacca off the Malaysian coast. It was the third collision in the world's busiest sea lane in September.

World attention on the smog crisis has obscured the fact that millions of working farmers are suffering in Indonesia - with the world's fourth largest population - in the worst drought in over 50 years. Rice, which requires huge quantities of water, is a staple food and cash crop in most of Indonesia. Planting of next year's crop is also seriously affected.

Some 200,000 subsistence farmers in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), which shares the island of New Guinea with the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya (West Papua), are facing famine due to the effects of the drought. Already, more than 80 have died in PNG and 270 have died of starvation or cholera in Irian Jaya. The drought also continues to stalk producers of food and fiber in Australia.

The devastating drought is caused by an El Niņo weather pattern, which generates unusually warm surface water along the Pacific coast of Latin America that then disrupts normal evaporation patterns in Southeast Asia and Australia. But in a world dominated by capitalist social relations, every genuinely natural disaster always has a disproportionate effect on workers and farmers, who are unable to buy their way out of trouble.

The laws of the capitalist market have driven up food prices throughout Indonesia, hitting the toilers hardest. "Everything we eat is more expensive now - at least 20 percent more for rice, sugar, oil," village women in Pringluan, Java, told the Sydney Morning Herald. Tanks of water are selling for more than a week's wages.

Australian imperialism has used the looming famine in Papua New Guinea, the jewel in its former colonial crown, to pose as having humanitarian concern for the peoples of PNG. Australian Air Force transport planes have recently begun flying missions into the Highlands to deliver disaster management teams and some food and other supplies. But Alexander Downer, Canberra's foreign minister, angrily denied reports that Canberra had made Kiunga - the main Highland town that supports the now closed, water-starved giant Ok Tedi copper and gold mine - its main priority. The mine is owned by BHP, one of the biggest Australian companies.

Doug Cooper is a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union.  
 
 
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