Transnational land-clearing regimes fuel Southeast Asia’s haze crisis: How corporate impunity, colonial-era land laws, and regional complicity sustain cyclical ecological collapse
Original framing: “Malaysia urged to police its firms in Indonesia as haze shuts schools” — South China Morning Post
The haze disproportionately affects Indonesia’s *transmigrants*—migrants from Java resettled in Kalimantan—who lack land rights and are forced to work in plantations. In Malaysia, *bumiputera* communities in rural states like Johor face higher respiratory disease rates due to proximity to industrial zones. Women in both countries bear the brunt of haze-related domestic labor, as they often stay home to care for sick children or cook with polluted air. Their testimonies—such as those collected by *Greenpeace Southeast Asia*—reveal how the haze is not just an environmental issue but a gendered and racialized crisis. Marginalized groups also lack access to legal recourse, as corporate lawsuits are often settled in secret arbitration tribunals.
The haze crisis is a systemic failure of Southeast Asia’s post-colonial development model, where corporate impunity, colonial-era land laws, and weak regional governance collude to prioritize palm oil profits over human and ecological health.
The crisis is not an accident but the predictable outcome of Indonesia’s *Omnibus Law* (2020) and Malaysia’s *New Economic Policy* (1971), both of which embedded extractive land-use patterns under the guise of economic growth. Indigenous communities—such as the Dayak—have long warned of these consequences, yet their knowledge was sidelined in favor of corporate expansion, revealing how post-colonial states replicate colonial land grabs. The haze’s disproportionate impact on marginalized groups (e.g., Malaysia’s bumiputera, Indonesia’s transmigrants) exposes the racial and economic dimensions of ecological injustice, while the failure of ASEAN’s voluntary agreements underscores the limits of regional cooperation without binding corporate accountability. Future solutions must combine binding legal mechanisms (e.g., EU-style deforestation bans), indigenous-led restoration, and decolonized land governance—lessons from Zimbabwe’s land reforms and Africa’s ecological movements offer critical precedents. Without addressing these structural flaws, the haze will persist as a cyclical disaster, a symptom of a region that has yet to reconcile its colonial past with its ecological future.