Hazing Rituals

Palm oil farmers in Malaysia and Indonesia continue to set fires to clear land, with some getting out of control. A blanket of smog creeps over the region, drifting into Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore, a source of investment funds for the plantations, has passed laws allowing complaints about the foreign fires to be considered in its courts. “ASEAN was designed precisely to foster the kind of regional co-operation that cross-border pollution seems to demand,” reports the Economist, but the annual burning continues despite efforts of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This has “tested the organisation’s aspiration to become more than a talking-shop among governments and to forge a co-operative ‘community.’” The haze is especially thick in Sumatra. The Indonesian government has dispatched soldiers to battle the fires, and the president expresses impatience: “Everyone knows what needs to be done.” Rain forests are vanishing and the smoke adds to health problems in the nations where the fires rage, yet ASEAN declines to intervene in member states’ internal affairs. – YaleGlobal