World News
Indonesia orders company permits revoked as haze from Borneo crosses two borders
By Staff Writer | 25 August 2026
Smoke from fires in Kalimantan gave a Malaysian city the worst air of any major city on Monday. Four companies in West Kalimantan are under investigation.
President Prabowo Subianto has told police and prosecutors to strip the business permits of any company found to have ordered the burning of forest or land, as smoke from fires on Borneo drifted across two national borders. He was speaking on Monday at a coordination meeting on fire management at Pekanbaru, in Riau, having spent the weekend in Kalimantan.
We will revoke all of the corporation's permits. I am not playing around
Prabowo Subianto, President of Indonesia
He said the trigger would be an indication that a company had ordered burning, and that no company would be exempt. On the Malaysian account of the same remarks he put it as revoking all of a company's permits if there were indications it had ordered the burning. The government says four companies in West Kalimantan are being investigated over the fires and has not identified them.
The numbers, and what each of them counts
Two hotspot figures are in circulation and they measure different things. The forestry ministry's monitoring system records 2,894 hotspots across ten provinces in Sumatra, with South Sumatra at 1,410, Riau at 480 and Jambi at 425, and puts the area burned across those ten provinces at 36,047.64 hectares this year. The same ministry's fire monitoring platform gives 5,102 hotspots nationally for the month, which is described as the highest August total in a series that runs from 2015.
The consequence is now a regional one. A Swiss air quality service ranked Kuching as having the poorest air of any major city on Monday, with Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore also among the worst. Singapore's National Environment Agency said it had seen an escalation in hotspot and smoke activity over the weekend and that its twenty four hour Pollutant Standards Index had reached 90 in the central area, where anything above 100 is treated as unhealthy. Malaysia and Brunei are pressing for the matter to be handled at regional level.
Permits are the only lever a government has that operates before a fire starts. Prosecution follows the damage; revocation removes the reason to take the risk.
The other half of the instruction
Alongside the threat to companies, Prabowo told officials to give smallholders somewhere else to go. Burning is the cheapest way to clear a plot, and it stays the cheapest way until an alternative is put within reach of the person holding the machete.
If they need to clear land, they should report it to the sub-district head or regent, and the government will help them
Prabowo Subianto, President of Indonesia
He said the military, the police and local government would help organise clearing through farmer groups, with the cost carried through the small business credit programme or through cooperatives. He also asked for village level education so that people understand that land burning is prohibited.
Fires are a seasonal event across much of South East Asia. What has made this year worse is the weather: low rainfall and higher temperatures under the current El Nino pattern have left peat and scrub dry enough to carry a fire that would otherwise have gone out.
For anyone with a site, a plant or a workforce in the region, the practical effect arrives as lost hours rather than lost buildings. Outdoor work in poor air is a matter for a method statement rather than a weather forecast, and on the evidence of Monday's readings the exposure now reaches well beyond the country the fires are burning in.