The ongoing fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan, which blanketed Indonesia and the neighbouring countries of Singapore and Malaysia in thick smoke in 1997, echoed the environmental disaster there in 1994. In both years, the smoke caused poor visibility, air pollution and severe health problems for millions of people in the region, and both years, the main response to the smoke crisis both within Indonesia and in the rest of the world was to call for a ban on all land-clearing fires. However, as members of the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn (ASB) Indonesia Consortium report in this article, that response is as ineffectual as the causes of the fires are complicated. Most of the problem in 1997 was the use of fire by large companies to clear land for plantations rather than the use of fire by smallholder farmers, and the situation was aggravated by El Niño (as it was in 1994). More creative and long-term responses to the fire problem are discussed. These include: a monitoring and enforcement system to punish large companies for the negligent use of fire (local communities mostly already have their own effective systems of fines and other penalties); addressing social, policy and tenurial issues so that fire is not used as a tool by large companies in conflict with the needs of local farmers; implementing a workable mix of regulations, sanctions and incentives for large companies for managing smoke and fires; developing alternatives to unsustainable forms of slash-and-burn agriculture (such as community forestry and agroforestry); clearing land without burning; regulating burning by large companies to times when it does less harm (i.e not in El Niño years); and altering Indonesian forest policy so that domestic timber prices are no longer depressed relative to world prices, so that less 'waste' is burned, and land clearance timber is sold instead.
