As a general rules: Myanmar’s coup

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. For most people, balsa wood is what model airplanes are made of. It's incredibly light and stiff. That's why it's also a core component in wind turbines. And the wind power boom has put serious pressure on Ecuador, where much of the world's balsa grows. And it's widely agreed that those applying for citizenship should speak their new country's language to some degree. Knowing the local tongue, after all, helps citizens assimilate. But many of Europe's language tests are self defeatingly difficult. First up, though, in the early hours of yesterday morning, Myanmar's military toppled the elected government. The state broadcaster went off air and mobile Internet connections and phone services were temporarily disrupted. Supporters of the coup paraded through the streets of Myanmar's largest city, Yangon. The country's de facto leader, Aung San SUU Kyi, was detained along with other senior figures from the ruling National League for Democracy, or NLD party. On military owned tv, the Myanmar army declared a state of emergency and said it carried out detentions in response to election fraud. The Nobel Peace Prize winner is wildly popular in Myanmar. During the country's military dictatorship, she led the opposition for nearly 15 years. While under house arrest in 2011, the army ended nearly 50 years of rule, making way for the pro democracy NLD to triumph in a general election five years later. In that transition, the generals made sure they kept control of important levers of power. But yesterday's coup suggests perhaps not as many levers as they might have liked.

Right now, the army is in control of the country. A state of emergency has been declared and complete authority has been put in the hands of the commander in chief, Minong Lain.

Charlie McCann is our southeast Asia correspondent.

Troops are patrolling streets in big cities. They've shut the airport. They've erected blockades, some roads. And according to reports by the Associated press. Hundreds of MPs are currently being confined in government housing, among them, Aung San SUU Kyi.

And why do you think the army seized power now? What led to this?

Well, the trouble all began in November when the general election was held. Ms. Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won in a landslide. She won 83% of the elected seats, and the main opposition party, which is backed by the army, won just 7%. That's a humiliating blow for the army. And the army says actually the election was fraudulent, and it has taken its complaints to the Supreme Court, even though these allegations have been rejected by the Election Commission. And independent observers say that the election was conducted appropriately. And so tensions have escalated in the last several weeks. The military spokesman refused to rule out the possibility of a couple several days ago. And things came to a head in the wee hours of February 1, which is when the next session of Parliament was due to begin. That would have enshrined the election result by allowing SUU Kyi's government to start its next term. And that, of course, won't be happening now.

And why was it that that election result was such a problem for military leaders? Would the military have lost power?

Actually, no. The army has retained huge authority in Myanmar ever since it gave up power in 2011. In the 2000s, it came up with a new political system. This provided for a civilian government, but allowed the military to retain many of its powers. And that, in effect, gives them control over the police, the intelligence services, border guards, and of course, the army. On top of that, a quarter of seats in Parliament are reserved for serving officers. And because amendments to the constitution require the support of 3/4 of MPs, the army can veto any changes it doesn't like.

So if the army has built for itself a government and a constitution that protects its interests, why stage a coup?

I suspect the commander realized that the system that the generals had devised for themselves didn't actually protect them as well as they thought it did. The constitution prevents anyone who has family members who are foreign citizens from becoming president. And that provision effectively barred SUU Kyi from becoming president because she has two sons who are British citizens. But when her party came to power in 2016, they invented for themselves the position of state councillor, which they gave to SUU Kyi. So the president reports to her, and she is effectively in control of the government. The army did not see that coming. And they are deeply unhappy with the fact that their arch rival is in control of the political system that they designed And SUU Kyi is bent on bringing the military under civilian control. It's very hard for her to do that because the army does have this veto over constitutional reform, but they are nonetheless concerned that she might find some clever, clever way of doing it. On top of that, there are personal reasons that the commander may have felt the need to enact this coup. He's supposed to retire in July. It's thought that he might have political ambitions of his own, that he might have wanted to become president. Of course, the NLD triumphed in the election in November, and so he may have felt forced to act.

And the country is no stranger to coups. How do you think that the people of Myanmar will react this time around?

There's a lot of dismay and anger. SUU Kyi is beloved by the public, and she has urged the people of Myanmar to resist the couple. We are seeing signs that people are thinking about some form of protest. Student unions, teacher unions, various associations are talking about committing acts of civil disobedience. It certainly helps that all Burmese people have smartphones now, so it's easier to organize than it would have been just 10 years ago. And I think it's important to note that unlike the last time the army seized power in 1990, the Burmese today have experienced five years of democracy. They do not want to return to the dark days in the military junta.

And is there anything that the rest of the world can do here?

US President Joe Biden has threatened to reinstate sanctions. The White House press secretary gave a statement yesterday. We removed sanctions. The United States, I should say, removed sanctions on Burma over the past decade.

Based on progress toward democracy.

The reversal of that progress will necessitate an immediate review of our sanctions laws.

And authorities, followed by appropriate action.

Those sorts of measures may not necessarily hurt the army, and they may well hurt the poor most. The Biden administration will also be wary of isolating Myanmar, which might mean pushing it further into China's orbit. Myanmar's neighbors have been less harsh in their condemnation. ASEAN member states have said this is an internal affair. China referred to this as a major cabinet reshuffle.

So what does all this tell you about the degree to which Ms. Tsu Ki ever really was in power?

She certainly did have power. The military was all too happy to leave the thankless bits of governing to her. So she was in control of the economy, education, health care, but she was powerless where it really counted. She was never able to bring the army to heel, never able to punish it for the abuses and war crimes. It's committed to and not able to end the civil wars that have been raging in Myanmar for decades. And she wasn't able to recast Myanmar as a multicultural society rather than a country which favors the my majority. Though it should also be noted that she hasn't shown that much appetite for that kind of change. In 2019, she rushed to the military's defense at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, where they'd been accused of committing genocide against the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim ethnic minority group in Myanmar.

Thanks very much for joining us, Charlie.

Thank you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show Notes. Renewable energy targets and subsidies around the world have fueled a rush into the development and deployment of wind turbines. It's a trend with obvious environmental credentials, but less obviously, it's one that's driving more logging in the Amazon and harming some of the indigenous people who live there.

Rising demand for wind power has set off a scramble for balsa wood in Ecuador.

Sarah Maslin writes about South America for the Economist.

This out of control logging has had unintended consequences for the local indigenous Watani community and others in the Ecuadorian Amazon, degrading the forest and fueling violence.

So why is there so much demand for balsa?

In particular, the race to decarbonize means that wind power has been growing massively. Global wind power capacity has been increasing by 9% a year over the past decade, which is a really good thing. In 2020, new installed capacity surged by 24% as China and the US rushed to install turbines before tax credits and subsidies expired. However, a lot of people don't know this, but there's actually a kind of light, stiff wood called balsa that goes into the core of wind turbine blades to add strength between two fiberglass skins. And 80% comes from Ecuador. And so the more turbines that have been built in the past few years, the more blades they've need. Which has created kind of a gold rush in Ecuador.

A harmful one as far as Ecuadorians would be concerned.

Ultimately, yes, most balsa wood comes from plantations where it's sustainably harvested on Ecuador's coast. But that wasn't enough to meet the demand in 2019 and 2020, so loggers went to the Amazon, where it grows naturally. At first, this was a really good thing for indigenous communities. Many people lack jobs and live in poverty, but the harvest soon became a free for all and many workers didn't get paid. Others got paid such low prices, as little as $1.50 a tree. Also, often the payment came partly in the form of liquor or marijuana, and that encouraged drug abuse and violence, which were already big problems for these communities. So the Watani decided in October to kick the loggers out. So did the Wampees, another indigenous group on the border between Ecuador and Peru. When their guests refused to leave, the tribe seized seven boatloads of wood, and the loggers retaliated by holding 19 Wampis hostage at a river crossing. Ultimately, they were let go, but only after the Peruvian government negotiated a deal where the tribe actually gave back all of the wood. Saul from the community we visited said he feels guilty now for encouraging people to cut balsa down. He didn't know it would get this bad.

We've talked many times on the show before about the levels of deforestation. The risk that that brings. Presumably this frenzy for balsa just adds to that problem.

It's a little more complicated than that. Balsa is actually a really fast growing tree. It can be grown for use in five to seven years, which means that, you know, first of all, most of it was grown before on these plantations by the coast. And second of all, it's not a massive carbon store. So cutting it down doesn't immediately huge effects for climate change. That said, these kind of trees get much less regulatory protection than older and rarer trees. So it was relatively easy for people to go in and use a kind of simplified collection permit to cut it down. That really facilitated this out of control logging. And once people go into the forest to cut the balsa down, they sometimes cut other trees down as well, or they start hunting for endangered species. And all of this traffic in and out of the forest to cut down the balsa has caused degradation.

And what's the market like for this balsa once it actually leaves Ecuador? You said America's and China's demand has been really driving the recent boom.

Part of the reason the situation has gotten so out of control is because the boom in balsa wood attracted all of these middlemen to log it and process it and export it. A lot of them are from China. China is building more turbines more quickly than any other country in the world. At the end of last year, China's president Xi Jinp announced plans to reach 1200 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity by 2030, which is a huge goal. But with the growth of the demand, tons of new Chinese companies and Ecuadorian companies to serve the Chinese market started to spring up. Sometimes they had no experience dealing with balsa and would send the wood off in ships or airplanes to China when it was still too young or hadn't been properly dried and processed, which meant that it rotted away during the journey. But just recently, in the past couple of months, we've seen demand come quickly down. This is partly because of Chinese New Year. They've put a pause on business until February. But it also could be the beginning of a bust cycle, which has happened before for balsa.

But why then, if demand is constantly rising, should there be a bust now?

The balsa shortage in Ecuador actually led to changes in the wind industry. The shortage accelerated a shift to making blade cores from pet, a synthetic foam that is much cheaper and used to be considered inferior. But engineers have finally managed to make some designs that are pretty good. Western turbine makers have realized that they have a supply chain risk with balsa and have started shifting their production over to pet. Still, demand for balsa is likely to continue because Chinese manufacturers still depend on it. But its long term future as a blade component depends partly on whether the problems that Ecuador has experienced over the past couple of years can be solved. The Ecuadorian government drafted some stricter rules for how balsa can be harvested, and many of the indigenous communities, including the Wadani, plan to start cooperatives to harvest balsa sustainably and sell it at fair prices without harming the rainforest. It'll be really interesting to see what happens with balsa going forward, especially in China. We know how big of a deal sustainability is for Western consumers. The CEO of one of the big balsa exporting companies in Ecuador asked whether a person in Stockholm charging an electric car with energy generated from wood bought illegally in the Amazon would feel right about that. The answer is probably no, but we don't know yet whether drivers in Beijing will feel the same.

Thanks very much for joining us, Sarah.

Thanks, Jason.

Being able to speak a country's official language is a common prerequisite for gaining citizenship. In order even to get a no strings working visa here in Britain, I had to prove I could speak English. That spurred many jokes from my London friends about whether the American variant counted. I had it easy, but for many other would be new citizens of European countries, it can be all but impossible.

Nearly all the countries in Europe require a test to show that you speak the national language before you can be naturalized and get the citizenship of that country.

Lane Greene writes Johnson, the Economist's language column.

The tests have varied over time and they vary across place. Sometimes they've been quite simple. In fact, in many countries they used to involve just basically sitting down with a policeman or local official, civil servant, and having a conversation. And then after that conversation, that official would certify that you spoke the language. Increasingly, though, we're getting written tests. They're often computerized, and in some countries they can be quite difficult.

And which countries are those?

So in recent years, Denmark, for example, has increased the difficulty of its exams under a sort of center right government, which was supported by an even more right wing, anti immigration party. I looked at some of the tests they've given recently and they really require some quite difficult work. One is scanning 16 pages of written material on what's called the Danish People's Enlightenment, which was a movement to create sort of schools for adult education and things like scouting coming out of the 19th century. And you had to read a bunch of different articles and then answer a dozen or 15 questions in free response, not multiple choice. And this stuff was really quite difficult. And one of the barriers that this presents is that a lot of immigrants in a place like Denmark have learned to speak the language quite well. Colloquially. They use the language in their shops, where they work, or in their neighborhoods or in their schools, and they can speak it pretty well, but it is a sort of colloquial spoken register. Then they sit down and they get a difficult written test facing styles and grammar and stuff that they just haven't seen before.

And so what are the arguments in terms of how difficult these language tests should be to accomplish the stated goal?

I guess the practical argument would be that really it helps to be a fluent reader in order to be able to follow the politics of the country that you hope to become a voting citizen of. And on its face, that's not totally unreasonable. The question is whether the tests are really fit for the purpose.

Fit for purpose in what way?

Well, you want the people living in the country to want to integrate. Everyone agrees that it's best for those people to learn the language of the country they're in. But the question is how you get them to do it. And this self defeating element comes in when you make the test so difficult and you make the opportunity to learn so difficult to get at that people give up. A lot of immigrants find that they're never going to get to the level that's being asked of them. And classes are not frequent, they're not affordable, they don't have childcare, they come in working hours. And then the amount of time they have to spend studying to get to this unrealistically high level means that there's just no point in even beginning what you'd rather do if you really want people to integrate is to do the opposite. You want to make it as free or as nearly free as possible. Germany subsidizes its classes so that they're next to free and almost anybody can take them financially. You want to think about things like childcare for adults who have children. You want to make it possible for people to attend. You want to think about setting goals like helping people get jobs that are just a little bit out of reach if they can just improve their language just a little bit, rather than setting a goal that is so far off that the person who might try to reach it just simply can't see the end of the process.

Lane, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow. Sam.