The meeting was to build on the efforts made at the last regional meeting in
August, when Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Malaysia and host nation Singapore agreed to ban all open
burning. Indonesia believes that the local government needs to be encouraged to coordinate their efforts on
forest and land fire regulations, because a blanket ban is still not agreed upon. Officials agree that there
should be a strong crackdown on violators, but at the same time issued a gubernatorial regulation allowing
controlled burning by some small farmers. They claim that a blanket ban only hurt small producers and hurt
the province’s rice production.49