Part 1 · What the Bill fixes
Speaker, I support this Bill.
I thank the PAP government for a strong Bill that comes down firmly on the side of protecting Singaporeans.
For weeks this year, parents checked the PSI before letting their children out, and older residents with weak hearts and lungs were told to stay indoors. An economist's preliminary estimate is that this year's haze could cost Singapore more than the $1.83 billion of 2015, the costliest on record. Yet in the twelve years since the 2014 Act came into force, not one company has been fined or sued under it.
This Bill fixes many of the reasons why.
The cap for fines was $2 million, which was meaningless: less than one per cent of the average earnings of seven key agroforestry companies in 2014, and roughly what one 10,000-hectare clearing saves by burning instead of using machines. Now the fine is $1 million a day, capped at $20 million, and the court must also order the company to pay back the profit it gained or the loss it avoided.
The evidence and the cooperation had to come from abroad. A notice could only be served by hand or by consent, and ignoring it cost $5,000. Four cases from 2015 stayed open for a decade. Now notices can go by email or website, to an address anywhere. Assessors are appointed at the company's cost, can enter the land, owe their duty to the Director-General, and their reports count as evidence. Refusing them costs up to $20 million.
The defendant had to be in court. Now there is trial in absentia.
The defences were wide. A company could escape by proving the haze came solely from a natural disaster, or that it had taken reasonable care. Both escapes are gone. A company that says a stranger lit the fire must now also prove it took all reasonable measures to prevent the fire and to put it out.
And the only levers were a conviction or a lawsuit. Now Ministers can designate a company and order banks, insurers and buyers to stop dealing with it. This is the biggest change in the Bill. It reaches a company's money and trade without waiting years for court.
Clean air is a precondition for the quality of life of everyone in Singapore. The Friday night of the Singapore Grand Prix, when the 24-hour PSI reached 192, brought global attention to this problem, and renewed urgency which we should not squander.
Part 2 · What the Bill leaves open
Speaker, I have three clarifications.
First, contested maps. Professor Alan Tan of NUS, writing on the 2014 Act, suggested making companies hand over the maps they themselves use. The Bill comes close: a document naming a company as concession holder or land manager makes it the presumed owner. But what happens when a company marks that map as contested? Can a company be designated while the dispute is live, or will the dispute stall the process, the way four cases stalled for a decade?
Second, assets abroad. A judgment can still only be collected from assets in Singapore. Will the Government pursue reciprocal enforcement arrangements with regional partners?
Third, the new civil penalty. The Agency can now go to court for a civil penalty, where it only has to show that its case is more likely than not, instead of proving it beyond reasonable doubt. But a civil action must stop once a criminal charge is brought for the same act, and cannot start after a conviction or an acquittal. So the Agency must choose which route to take first. What will guide the Agency’s choice between the civil and criminal route, given that it cannot run both at once?
But it is entirely right that Singapore uses the full extent of its levers, legislative and otherwise, to enforce the duty of Singapore-linked companies to keep our air clean.
Part 3 · The ground, and what works
Yet having said all of that, this Bill alone will not tackle the totality of the problem.
This Bill reaches companies with a stake in Singapore. But by one count, about half the land that burned in Indonesia from January to August lay outside any permit or concession, on community, state and abandoned land. Many of those fires are on smallholders' land. The Bill is necessary, but it is not sufficient. So I want to speak about the ground in Borneo and especially Kalimantan, because the incentives there are formidable.
Anyone who has set foot in rural Borneo has felt the power of its geography: the rugged interior, and a jungle that reclaims fallow land in months. Its vast magnificence is unforgiving.
Why do the people resort to burning? Part of it is economics.
Small oil-palm farmers without a company contract often borrow cash or fertiliser from the middleman who buys their fruit. They repay him at harvest, when he deducts the loan from the fruit they sell him, and they are paid 20 to 30 per cent below the benchmark price. Their dilemma is simple: "If I can't clear this land now, next year I'm bankrupt."
Machinery and fertiliser cost money they don't have, and roads into the interior are poor. Clearing by machine costs about US$150 a hectare; fire costs about US$7, and the ash from burning acts as fertiliser. Leave a plot alone for six months and the jungle reclaims it.
In Kubu Raya, West Kalimantan, in 2016, about thirty farmers blocked a joint team of police, soldiers and firefighters from putting out land they had burned. They said the ash would feed the soil before planting. Then they asked two questions: why was burning banned, and what would the government offer instead? That second question deserves an answer built on incentives, and not only on bans.
In Berau, East Kalimantan, this August, a man was named as a suspect for burning about 12 hectares for oil palm. In Ketapang, West Kalimantan, in September, officials found oil palm being planted on land where the smoke had only just cleared. In Kobar, Central Kalimantan, this September, crews were refused access near some buildings, and the local disaster agency warned that obstructing firefighters can be prosecuted. The burned land was thought to have been cleared for farming.
Part of it is tradition.
Burning to farm is centuries old in Borneo. Hill rice has long been grown in burned forest clearings; in the Kelabit Highlands, rice cultivation may go back between 1,200 and 2,800 years. For rural leaders, ending burning outright has long been politically impossible, and the law in both Indonesia and Malaysia makes room for it. Indonesia's environmental law lets a household burn up to two hectares, planted with local crops and ringed by a firebreak. Sarawak, in deference to these cultural and economic realities, has staggered its farmers' burning by schedule since 2003, and revoked permits when the haze came this July. At our equator there is no winter, so farming seasons can be spread out. Both sides of Borneo share the idea of a small, controlled burn.
But the yearly haze is man-made, and recent. We need to decouple haze from burning. Airport visibility records going back to 1960 show Indonesian Borneo turning from fire-resistant to fire-prone sometime between the droughts of 1972 and 1982. The farmers did not change; the land did. From 1967, new laws opened Kalimantan's forests to logging companies. Population grew, and small subsistence farms gave way to industrial plantations. When the drought of 1982 to 1983 came, about 3.5 million hectares of East Kalimantan burned, four-fifths of it logged-over forest. Over the decades, canals were dug through Kalimantan's peat to drain it for timber, plantations and farms.
West Kalimantan's rules are instructive. On top of the two-hectare allowance, household burning must be on mineral soil, never on peat. Timing and place are the foundation of a controlled burn.
That points at the problem. In October, the head of Indonesia's disaster agency said about 90 per cent of the active fires in Central Kalimantan were on peat.
On peat, a controlled burn is very difficult. Peat is half-rotted plant matter, soaked through like a sponge. While it is wet, air cannot get in, so it cannot burn. Dig canals to drain it for crops, and the top dries into fuel. Once it catches fire, it smoulders underground like a giant mosquito coil: hard to see, hard to put out, and full of thick smoke. In a long El Niño drought, like this year's, more of it dries out.
So the physical culprits are two: drained peat, which is the fuel, and El Niño, which sets how dry the year gets. We cannot change the weather. We cannot, from Singapore, change the tradition of burning or where it happens. But perhaps we can change the economics, so that keeping peat wet pays off.
On mineral soil, Indonesia and Malaysia can lead on timing controlled burns. Singapore can support them with meteorological forecasting and scientific modelling.
On peat, the control that works is water. Indonesia's own law already draws a line: the water table on peat must stay within 40 centimetres of the surface. The science bears it out: one assessment found peat burned only where the water table had fallen below 60 centimetres, with fire danger high mostly below 40.
The evidence suggests the crop can live with it. Oil palm has no taproot; on peat, most of its roots sit in the top 30 centimetres. On a plantation in Sarawak, photosynthesis peaked with the water 30 to 40 centimetres down, and on 41 smallholder farms in Jambi, the water level made no detectable difference to yield.
The realistic theory of change for smallholder behaviour is not to go from burning to not burning. It is going from uncontrolled burning on dry peat to controlled clearing on wet peat.
Incentives shape behaviour. And what a financial centre can help catalyse is a market in a type of carbon credit for Indonesia that pays smallholders to keep peat wet.
This is not new in spirit. Singapore has signed carbon credit implementation agreements with twelve countries, from Papua New Guinea, Ghana and Peru to Bhutan, Thailand, Vietnam and, in September, Laos. Last year the Government chose about 2.2 million tonnes of credits from projects in Peru, Paraguay and Ghana. In July, we exchanged memoranda on carbon credits with Indonesia, but there is not yet an implementation agreement. And this year, Indonesia cleared its forestry projects to sell credits again after a three-year freeze.
A credit pays for emissions avoided, so it must be checked. Buyers would pay the way a trader pays for cargo: on delivery, after inspection. If the peat is dry, there is no payment. I believe the world will pay, once it can see the water table.
The part Singapore can really help catalyse is the part every buyer needs: the readings. A water logger is a small sensor lowered into a pipe in the peat. It records the water level at set intervals and sends the readings by mobile or satellite link, so no one has to walk out to read it. Singapore can help raise funding for a network of loggers, placed where Indonesia chooses, with readings the world can trust and buy against. Then the money reaches the people who keep the peat wet, on time.
It needs three things. First, accurate concession and land maps, so the payment goes to whoever is keeping the peat wet. Second, a proper trial of how each centimetre of water table trades crop yield against fire risk, so the price is right. Third, coverage and upkeep. The loggers run seven to ten years on batteries, but any physical network must come with a maintenance fund and local crews paid to keep the stations working.
Nor is the hardware too costly. At around US$2,000 a logger (maybe less), equipping all 21,000-odd points Indonesia estimates it needs would cost roughly what three maximum fines under this Bill come to.
There have been earlier attempts. Norway has paid Indonesia for verified cuts in deforestation emissions, and the World Bank pays East Kalimantan for verified emission reductions. As a financial centre, Singapore can supply the readings and help catalyse such a carbon credit market, while Indonesia and its people earn from genuine wet-peat credits. It is in our interest to open new channels of investment into Indonesia, in support of President Prabowo's aim that growth reach ordinary Indonesians.
For company land, the Bill already gives the Director-General a way to bring the readings in. An assessor must report on any matter the Director-General specifies. My fourth question: will the Director-General ask assessors to report the water table on the land they assess? A company that says it took all reasonable measures should be able to show it kept its peat as wet as Indonesia’s own law requires.
And my fifth question for the Government: as we negotiate an implementation agreement on carbon credits with Indonesia, will we make wet-peat projects with measured water tables a priority category?
As a good neighbour, we want Indonesia, and the five Kalimantan provinces and their people, to come out of this stronger.
Close
Speaker, in conclusion, this Bill makes burning expensive for companies with a stake in Singapore. A lasting solution will likely also need controlled clearing on wet peat to be worth more to the farmers who live on it than uncontrolled burning on drained dry peat is.
This year's haze has brought a new seriousness. Let us use it to spare the next generation. I support the Bill.
