Haze blanketing Haze blanketing Singapore, Malaysia Singapore, Malaysia puts focus on puts focus on plantation firms in plantation firms in IndonesiaIndonesia

THE acrid haze again blanketing Singapore and southern Malaysia from burning forestlands in Indonesia's Riau province raises another difficult, hazy issue: the environmental and corporate responsibilities of forestry and plantation companies and who should be enforcing them.

As in the two previous outbreaks of "the haze" that choked Indonesia's neighbourhood, in 1997 and 2005, industrial-scale forest clearing by burning -- cheap, destructive, illegal but still widely employed -- has ignited large swathes of peat soil.