I still remember the year that I was cycling to school 1994. During the mid-year, our country and Singapore was filled by choking haze that caused by more than 1000 forest fires burning in our neighbouring country, Indonesia. I was wearing a smog mask every day when I stepped out of my house.
Since then, it happens every mid-year without fail. The air quality in some areas dropped dramatically. Visibility in several parts of the country had been reduced to as low as two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the normal 10 kilometers (six miles). The sad part is the fires are mainly caused by illegal slash-and-burn cultivation on plantations by Indonesia farmers. The haze not just threaten Malaysia travel business but most importantly it is harmful to our health.
I believe both Malaysia and Singapore government has raised complaints to the Indonesia government but there isn't any solution since 1994.

• Rainforests cover 2% of the earth's surface and 7% of its land mass. They originally covered at least twice that.
• The rainforest is one of the earth's abundant resources, one of its fastest shrinking ones.
• According to the National Academy of Science, at least 50 million acres a year are lost, an area roughly the size of England, Wales, and Scotland combined

http://www.ran.org/info_center/about_rainforests.html