Indonesia hopes to see a major improvement in the annual problem of choking haze within the next two years after introducing tough new methods to tackle the problem, Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar has said.

Witoelar said yesterday police could now seize land hit by suspicious fires and the ministry would also work to raise the water levels in peat areas to reduce the chance of blazes.

Indonesian farmers burn forests and shrubland annually to clear land for agriculture, causing a choking haze that spreads across Southeast Asia during the dry season, affecting tourism and health in the region.

Witoelar said police would confiscate any land which was burned and would prevent plantation owners from illegally expanding their holdings.

"The government has created an initiative where we will now hold responsible any plantation owners where there is fire, whether they started it or not," he told a Jakarta Foreign Correspondents' Club lunch.

"If there are any burnings and we cannot get to the bottom of it, we will confiscate the land and put a police line there so that it cannot be cultivated. So there will be no motive for anyone to consciously burn the land," he said.

He said the "policy has yielded results" since it was introduced in August, pointing to Riau Province, opposite Singapore, where "the hotspots have been reduced very drastically" even before the start of the rainy season.

"We are taking hostage any area that has been burnt in our efforts to find out who did it. If it cannot be proven conclusively, we will hold it hostage because then we will dare the owners to sue me if we are not right," the minister said.

Deep-seated peat fires could not be tackled by aerial spraying, so the ministry was planning to damn irrigation channels and ditches to raise the water levels in affected areas so the peat would not burn so readily.

"We expect to have a decrease of 30 to 40 per cent of happenings (fires started) there, which I think will cut down on the total size of the burnings we've experienced in previous years," he said.