Back in August, a Singapore business journalist called about transboundary haze — the fires causing respiratory issues in Indonesia and now Singapore and beyond. He wanted to talk economics: who pays to prevent the fires, and why the money never reaches the people who matter most. He found us through our report on financing for palm oil smallholders. Behind his questions is a season burning since mid-July in Sumatra and Kalimantan, worsened by slash-and-burn and a strong El Niño. I told him something that sounds ironic: the haze is a live awareness-raising campaign. It turns an invisible issue — what global supply chains do to the environment — into something you can see and cough on. You can’t buy that kind of attention. The smoke delivers it for free.
But attention narrows quickly. It’s easy, from the buying side, to focus on ourselves: green supply chains, NDPE pledges, clean lines across messy maps. The harder question sits upstream, with the smallholders who actually hold the land. They need support to keep earning their livelihoods, or they get squeezed out of the market entirely. Sustainability that prices out the smallest players isn’t sustainability. They should not be paying the price for the rest of us.
That’s the work that would have taken us to West and Central Kalimantan this month — a trip cancelled by the haze. Yet the conversations haven’t stopped; we’re already meeting our local CSO partners online about what smallholders need most: financial literacy, long-term economic planning, a better read of the market. And now we’re adding something the haze itself taught us — protecting their own health against the fires and smoke. Which raises the journalist’s real question: who pays for all this? Our hope is that industries and the market internalize the cost, so the smallest players stop paying the price for everyone else.
Please read through our Lonely Nature Newsletter for August-September 2026!