Southeast Asia Paying High Toll for Prosperity

The man-made brush fires that are raging again in Indonesia are symptomatic of a wider regional peril: Southeast Asia’s rapid development is racking up an alarming toll in environmental destruction.

Pick almost any environmental topic, from urban pollution to deforestation, and Southeast Asia has a track record that is among the world’s worst. The result could eventually derail the region’s hope to achieve sustainable development and cause immeasurable global harm, ecologists say.

According to the World Health Organization, air pollution claims 1.56 million lives a year across Asia. Untreated water and bad sanitation take 500,000 more. Thailand, for instance, could cut deaths sharply by phasing out cheap two-stroke motorcycle engines. Of the 20 motorcycle models produced in Thailand, only two use efficient four-stroke engines, and they are primarily exported.

The Asian Development Bank in Manila calls Asia the “most polluted and environmentally degraded” place in the world. Half its forest cover and many of its animal and plant species have disappeared in the last 30 years. One-third of its agricultural land has been debased, and its fish stocks have fallen by half, according to the bank. No other region, the bank says, has so many heavily polluted cities.

Even countries like Singapore that have incorporated environmental concerns into their development plans are at risk because of the actions of their neighbors. Such was the case last year--and may be again this summer--when thick haze from Indonesia’s fires blanketed parts of six Southeast Asian countries. The cost in terms of health care and lost tourism and commerce was $1.3 billion.

Southeast Asia’s environment has been under pressure for a generation because of rapid industrialization and growing populations. Indonesia, for example, is growing at the rate of 2 million people a year. The government plans to clear 40 million acres of rain forest by 2020 to accommodate them. Vietnam’s population, now at 75 million, is expected to grow by 50 million by 2020.

“If you could rerun Southeast Asia’s growth, I think you’d do it differently,” the World Bank’s Andrew Steer said. “There would have been ways of growing almost as fast with a lot less cost to the environment.

“Obviously these governments can’t afford to spend, as the United States does, $100 billion a year on pollution control. But they can look for the free lunches. For instance, they can reconsider the energy subsidies they provide because it encourages consumers to use more energy than they need. And they have to start taking a tough look at the costs of environmental damage.”

Even though enforcement is often negligible, Asian governments are putting in place environmental ministries and agencies. (Vietnam has only 60 staffers in its agency.) But many of these governments take umbrage at the suggestion that they haven’t made use of technological advances to protect the environment and haven’t learned from history. They point out that countries in the industrialized West also chose to get rich and dirty first. Cleaning up the damage came next.

And Southeast Asia is going to have some cleaning up to do as increased prosperity translates into more pollution, with commuters increasingly forsaking bicycles for motor scooters and cars. Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, is now rated as one of the world’s most polluted cities. In Bangkok, the Thai capital, traffic jams of an hour or more are common. Manila businesspeople spend so much time going nowhere on narrow, clogged roads that they have turned their cars into offices, with computers and cell phones.

For many Asians, such inconveniences are nothing more than an almost welcome symbol of middle-class growth. But many experts believe that Asia’s rapid industrialization poses serious challenges for the ecosystem: Asia has 60% of the world’s population, and until the recent economic downturn, its industrialization was taking place at triple the pace of the West’s 18th century Industrial Revolution, the World Bank says.

One result: Asia’s rivers contain on average 20 times more lead than rivers in the industrialized West.

“Urgent steps are needed to reverse this trend and foster a more efficient and ‘environment friendly’ growth in years ahead,” a 1997 World Bank report said. The bank estimated that meeting these needs would cost $30 billion to $40 billion a year by 2000.

One of the most pressing needs, ecologists say, is to stop the destruction of the forests--which are nature’s “lungs,” cycling out waste and freshening the air. But the practice, from Indonesia to Vietnam, of clearing land using slash-and-burn techniques, the profitability of the logging industry and the destruction of trees to make charcoal to fire peasants’ stoves--Hanoi households use 100 tons of charcoal a week--have all led to mass deforestation.

Vietnam used to be one of the world’s most forested countries. Since 1945, however, its forest cover has been reduced from 43% to 28%, a result of both peacetime exploitation and wartime spraying of defoliants by U.S. planes. In the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta, the destruction of forests has led to the disappearance of songbirds, and the pesticides used by farmers to kill rice-paddy worms have devastated the freshwater fish stocks.

“Deforestation got dramatically worse in the 1980s when Vietnam started moving minority tribes out of the timbered central highlands to open up the area for exploitation,” said Tom Dillon of the World Wildlife Fund. “The government looks on the highlands as Americans once did California: an area of endless bounty.

“Vietnam is at a crisis point in terms of its natural resource base. The environment is taken seriously at the local level because floods and droughts and deforestation impact life. But at the national level, the environment is isolated as a sector thing and isn’t part of broad overall policy,” he said. “People go off to international conferences, but their input isn’t part of the policymaking equation.”

Recently, 200 bicyclists rode to the Royal Plaza in Bangkok to demand the creation of bike paths and a governmental commitment to clean up the polluted air. Many wore gas masks and carried oxygen tanks.