Teams of volunteers, many students, went out under the auspices of the Environment Ministry to fight the fires directly. The Minister of Forestry also spoke out strongly, even offering to resign, but took little or no action against those setting the fires. Few governments are willing to admit that palm oil and pulpwood plantations are being installed immediately after the clearing of ancient primary tropical forests. Indonesia is an exception. Fire, of course, is an effective tool for clearing forests.
Fire is simply the cheapest way to clear tropical forest once the large valuable timber is removed.
The timber industry is regulated, but the wood from palm oil plantations, is not. Yet timber and plantation baron Bob Hasan, as well as Willy Smits, continue to blame traditional shifting cultivators for the fires in the face of evidence that strongly suggests otherwise. The more recent fires reported in East Kalimantan are a result of a predicted second, more severe phase of El Nino, which has again denied rain to East Kalimantan. Decades of unsustainable logging and recent conversion of forest to plantations has degraded millions of acres of once primary tropical forest, leaving the forests unusually vulnerable to fire. Forest that is damaged by logging is eight to ten times more likely to burn than primary forest.