Police arrest 72 over Indonesia's fires and start following the money

Most of the fires filling the sky over Borneo and Sumatra were lit on purpose. The South China Morning Post, running a report from the Associated Press, says police have arrested 72 people suspected of starting them and are investigating 89 separate fire cases, spread across five provinces on Borneo and four on Sumatra. Mohammad Irhamni, who runs special crimes at the National Police's Criminal Investigation Agency, said most of those held are accused of burning land deliberately to clear it for plantations at lower cost.

That is the whole economics of it. Clearing forest or scrub with excavators costs money per hectare; a match costs nothing, and in a year like this one the fire does the work by itself. El Niño, the Pacific weather pattern that pushes Indonesia into a longer, harder dry season, has left the ground dry enough that a small fire set at the edge of a plot walks a long way on its own. The smoke has already drifted north over the border into Malaysia.

The arrests are not the interesting part. Investigators are going through financial records to find out whether companies ordered or paid for the burning, which is a different case from charging the person holding the match. That inquiry decides whether this crackdown changes anyone's calculation. A field worker who burns a plot faces jail; the plantation that ends up with cleared, plantable land faces nothing unless someone traces the payment back to it.

Why it matters

If you are breathing this smoke in Kalimantan or Sumatra, 72 arrests will not clean the air this week or next. The thing worth watching is whether a single company gets named and charged, because that is the only version of this story that raises the price of burning before the next dry season. For everyone else, including the neighbours now closing schools, it is the difference between a haze season that repeats every El Niño year and one that finally gets expensive for the people who profit from it.