Singapore is putting company names on the smoke

Singapore said on Friday that it will send warnings to seven Indonesian companies it has identified as responsible for the fires on Borneo and Sumatra. For years the smoke has been an argument between governments. Now a neighbour is attaching company names to it. A warning is not a fine, but a government can shrug off a complaint from abroad in a way a named company, with customers and lenders who read the news, cannot.

The numbers behind those warnings are large. The environmental group Auriga counted more than 637,000 hectares burned between January and August, about nine times the size of Singapore itself. The deforestation monitor Nusantara Atlas puts it closer to 900,000 hectares. Much of what burns is peatland, soil made of old waterlogged plant material that smoulders underground for weeks once it has been drained. France 24, reporting with AFP and Reuters, says the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre moved the southern half of the region to Alert Level 3 on Friday, the top of a four-step scale and the second time it has done that this year. IQAir ranked Singapore the world's second most polluted major city on Saturday, behind Baghdad, with Kuala Lumpur third.

Indonesia's own answer on Saturday was 2.4 tonnes of dry ice, dropped by plane over one of South Sumatra's main airports to break up the haze. Set against 637,000 hectares of burned land, that is a gesture. In Palangkaraya, a 38-year-old mechanic named Marzuki told AFP that this season is worse than 2015, the year Indonesians still use as the measure of a bad one, and that it costs him both health and income. Joko, 51, who works in construction, said he keeps working through it because he is paid by the day.

Why it matters

If you work for or supply a plantation or pulp company in Sumatra or Kalimantan, your employer's name may now sit on a list held in another country, and that is a commercial risk rather than only a political one. For everyone else the practical point is the air: Alert Level 3 means dense smoke is expected to stay, so count on more closed schools, delayed flights and days indoors. A spokesman for ASEAN in the Philippines said the haze will come up before November's summit in Manila, which is where the neighbours decide whether to keep asking politely or start using their courts.