Workers from a palm oil concession company extinguish a forest fire on June 29, 2013 in Kampar district, Riau. (AFP Photo/Romeo Gacad)

09/07/2013 (Jakarta Globe) - The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a nonprofit market-led association, said on Monday that it had cleared three member companies with plantations in Sumatra of responsibility for the fires that caused smoke and haze over Singapore, Malaysia and southern Thailand.

Malaysia-based Sime Darby and Kuala Lumpur Kepong and Singapore-based Golden Agri-Resources had submitted maps outlining their concession areas to show that their plantations had not been hotspots.

“Of the three companies only a few hotspots were present in a minority of the areas, and those fires were extinguished within 24 hours of their discovery,” RSPO said in a statement.

The statement was made following a request from the group for five member companies to investigate their concessions because they had been reported in the media to be involved in the forest fires in Indonesia. They were asked to submit digital maps of their Indonesian concession areas for analysis.

RSPO did not say why the maps released by the companies and those in the public domain were different.

RSPO hopes the collaboration between the group and its members can help reduce the annual haze in Southeast Asia. RSPO has also encouraged members with plantations to adopt fire-prevention measures within their concession, the group said in the statement.

The fire hotspots, many of them raging in peat forests, have generated huge amounts of thick haze that have driven air pollution indicators to record levels in Riau and across the Malacca Strait in Singapore and Malaysia.

The annual occurrence has been at its most severe in years. Indonesian officials have blamed local companies owned by Singaporean and Malaysian palm oil and forestry companies for the hotspots.

The haze frayed relations between Indonesia and its northern neighbors.