Fire Free Alliance To Prevent Forest Fires In 200 Villages

JAKARTA, March 16 (Antara) - A group of volunteers from various stakeholders who call themselves as Fire Free Alliance (FFA), is working together with communities to prevent forest fires in more than 200 villages of the total area 1.5 million hectares in Indonesia. "FFA is a medium for its members to develop the most effective strategies for preventing and managing risks caused by forest fires, through a long term partnership with the local communities throughout Indonesia and Malaysia," FFA secretary Dorjee Sun said in a press conference here, Wednesday. Consisting of forestry and plantation companies as well as non governmental organizations such as APRIL, Asian Agri, Musim Mas, IDH, and Wilmar as its members, FFA was established on February 2016 focusing on the efforts to prevent forest fires through cooperation with the local people. FFA has been working to prevent forest fires in 218 villages in Riau, Jambi, and Central Kalimantan, including 77 villages which enrolled as FFA members to participate in the intensive program of fire free in 2016. The number of participating villages has been increased more than 700 percent compared to the first Fire Free Village Programme (FFVP) launched in 2015 which was only involving nine villages. The fire incidents were reportedly decreased around 50-90 percent in a year. Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs assessed that the mitigation of forest fire should duly involve the local people considering human act was the main cause of the fire. Hence, the ministry encouraged not only the local governments but also private sectors to support the participation of the local people. APRIL Group company records 18 villages participated in the FFVP in 2016 by adding 50 villages in the previous program of Fire Awareness Communities. Such program will be continued in 2017 with the registered nine villages and another nine villages as the "Resilient Society of Fire". The program has been covering an area of 600,000 hectares in which 0.07 percent (420,000 hectares) of it was affected by fire in 2016.