Fuel to the fire: growing unrest in Iran

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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. The mistaken belief that rhinoceros horn can affect health or virility has been the animal's sake single biggest threat. But what if the illicit market for rhino horn could be flooded with a convincing fake? Scientists are on the case, and it's no surprise that eating meat is bad for the planet. But how bad? We look into a new study that crunches the numbers. Turns out there are some environmentally smart choices, even for those not ready to give up meat altogether. But first, Iran is being shaken by protests after its sanctions squeezed government cut petrol subsidies despite a widespread Internet blackout. Activists have managed to upload some videos of demonstrations and violence that they say are happening across the country. The protests began nearly a week ago and many Iranians rely on cheap petrol to get to work. Iran sits on vast oil deposits and affordable fuel can feel almost like a birthright. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has spoken publicly, saying the protests were a security matter, not a popular movement.

What I want to say is that no one should help these hooligans. No wise and deserving person interested in his own country, interested in his comfortable life should help them. They are the hooligans and not the ordinary people.

He and other Iranian officials claim the protests have been dealt with, but the Internet blackout and reports of demonstrations continue.

We know that Iran is suffering its greatest unrest at least for two years and possibly for a decade.

Nicholas Pelham is a Middle east correspondent for the Economist.

The immediate trigger has been an increase in fuel prices, which just seems to have been the last straw for many people. They've come out onto the streets in pretty large numbers in parts of Tehran, in satellite towns around the capital, and in pretty much every province across the country. Some of these protests have spiraled into riots. What began as denunciations of an increase in fuel prices has turned into a denunciation of the people at the top of the Iranian government, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Been chance for him to go. And what you're seeing really is a bubbling over of frustration.

And how have the authorities responded to this unrest?

Just as this is some of the worst unrest that Iran has seen in 40 years of the Islamic Republic, you're also seeing some of the harshest responses by the authorities themselves. They appear to have deployed some of the tactics that militias allied to them in other parts of the Middle east have been using it against protesters there. There have been reports of shooting, including in one case at least from a helic. We know from human rights monitors like Amnesty International that at least 100 people have been killed. There are reports that the number could be higher still. And the authorities have tried to impose a blackout on the country by jamming satellite television and critically, by cutting off the Internet to the outside world.

You've been in Iran recently. Does this explosion of anger surprise you based on what you learned then?

I spent much of the summer in Iran, and it was clear then that there was deep dissatisfaction with the state of affair, were suffering economically. They also deeply resented intrusion into their personal lives and their just general way of life by the authorities. It must be to some extent that people felt this was the last straw, that they had borne a lot. They'd seen a huge devaluation in the price of the real. So their salaries had depleted dramatically in value, their purchasing power had diminished significantly, and the government had only partially compensated by raising salaries, certainly far less than the rate of inflation or the depreciation of the rial. And so life has become much harder. And I just had a sense, have a sense now that there is a real state of despair in Iran. What was also significant at the time is that protests had been subsiding over the months There was a general state. I felt almost of apathy that there's no point. Protests aren't going to achieve anything. There's no organized opposition. Anybody who puts their head above the parapet will be suppressed. So the scale of the protests, I think, has surprised me. At the same time, it has to be said, that Tehran does feel like a kind of properly functioning city. Cafes are full. The cultural scene is in many ways booming. When you go to concerts, they're packed. The public transport is relatively good and functions quite well. It has one of the very few underground metro systems in the Middle East. So it isn't as if this feels like a society which is on the brink of collapse. It's just an overriding sense that times are hard and there's no prospect of them getting any easier. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. And I think that's what Iranians find so hard to deal with.

And how much has America's withdrawal from the nuclear deal and the ramping up of sanctions, though the maximum pressure campaign fed into this?

Economically, there's no question that sanctions and the policy of maximum pressure has had a dramatic effect on the economy. Growth of something in the region of 10% immediately after Iran's nuclear deal with the rest of the world and its return to oil markets has plummeted to a decline of about 10% in the economy. So you've seen a huge change economically. At the macro level, the government was budgeting for something like 1.5 million barrels per day of exports, and that probably not even managing to reach about a third of that, and that's had a huge impact as well on revenues. So the country is struggling to cope with maximum pressure. The Rouhani government felt that they had made some inroads into trying to address the greatest impact. The devaluation in the price of the real had ensured that they could continue to maintain salaries. Inflation was beginning to come under control. The depreciation of the rial of the Iranian currency seemed to bottom out and indeed regain some of its value. So there were signs that the Rouhani government was able to cope, but at a much lower level than had been the case two or three years earlier.

So do you think that this slow.

Buildup of pressure could even threaten the regime's survival?

It's undoubtedly the case that the Trump administration is changing life for Iranians. The question is, is it changing life for the better? What impact is it having on the regime? There are some in the US Administration who appear to believe that these protests could spiral into a full scale revolt. Street protests do have a history of being instrumental in Iranian politics. That would seem to be an optimistic scenario from the American point of view. The authorities have been successful in limiting both the size of the protests and their location. They seem to have pushed protests to the outskirts of cities. The Internet blackout is making it hard to mobilize. And so far, at least, we haven't seen the sort of scale of protests that would be needed to dramatically change who holds sway in the country. This is not a regime which is backing down. There have been no resignations and no sign of any reversal of policy.

And the authorities are showing no signs.

Of walking back or making concessions.

No, what you're seeing at the moment is something of a standoff. Indeed, one of the responses that we've seen is this is a regime which over the years has been fraught with division between pragmatists and hardliners, between those who want to reach out to the west and those who want to shut it out. And if anything, you're seeing a coalescing of the various arms of the regime united in a common front. And this is particularly emphasized by the body which took the decision to hike fuel prices. It's called the Supreme Council of Economic Coordination. It includes the three branches of government. And these bodies had all been at loggerheads over the years. And it's also got the blessing of the supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. So essentially what they're doing is shutting out internal division and dissent from within the system and trying to create a common front to deal with the challenges on the street.

Nicholas, thank you very much for your time.

Jason, thank you for having me.

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In the early 1900s, there were half a million rhinos in Asia and Africa. But following a century of poaching and habitat destruction, their population has plummeted. There are fewer than 30,000 of the animals left in the wild. And three out of the five remaining rhino species are listed as critically endangered. The market for ground up rhino horn, which many consumers wrongly believe to have medicinal qualities as put them at such risk. The conservationists are at work on an inventive new strategy in a bid to save these giant mammals from extinction.

So the number one factor threatening rhinos today is unquestionably poaching for their horns. And this is simply because rhino horns sell for so much money in Asia.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist.

People believe that rhino horn consumed properly, will make you horny. There are other medicinal properties associated with it and people are willing to pay enormous sums of money for the substance.

Got a sense right off hand what the going rate for rhino horn is.

It depends upon the species. But for white rhino you can get about 60 to $65,000 per kilogram. And when you think about that, white rhino can produce a horn pretty reasonably of three to four kilos. So you're talking about upwards of 220 to $260,000 for killing one rhino and running off with its horn.

So I've heard that one way to get around this is simply to remove the rhino's horns, which makes them safe from poaching because there's no value left in the animal. Is there more that can be done?

Right, So a lot of folks have suggested that one thing you can do is remove the rhino's horn so that there's nothing to go and grab. Yes, but an easier and possibly tactic would be to ruin the market for rhino horns entirely by flooding the market with rhino horns that are fakes that people can't discern from the real thing and selling those on the market and thereby dropping the demand because everyone can have their own rhino horn and it's all produced in a lab.

Right, so you mean casting them in some sort of plastic. I mean, what does a fake rhino horn look like?

A fake rhino horn in this case, as Fritz Vollrath at University of Oxford has pushed with, Fritz looked at the nearest relatives of rhinos. Now, rhino horn, as you may or may not know, is not actually a horn at all. It's hair, like your fingernails growing out of the animal's head. And rhinos are closely related to tapirs and to horses. Tapirs are not so easy to go and collect, but horses certainly abundant. They collected hair from the tails of horses and chemically treated it to strip off just the few things that don't look very rhino ish. Turns out horsehair has a layer on it that rhino hair does not. And then they bound them together and were able to create in a kiln, a type of horn that once polished down, is utterly indistinguishable from the real thing.

Utterly indistinguishable.

Extraordinarily difficult to tell apart. So, yes, it can be told apart with the DNA test. If you were to strip the horn apart and run it through a DNA tester, it would show you that it came from a horse rather than a rhino. But the thing is, the folks who are selling this stuff, they're selling it in the back rooms of stores and DNA detection equipment is not readily available.

And so now this team has a good fake, a great fake in hand, how to get it into the market to have the intended market effects.

Yeah, and now there's the really difficult part, because anyone who's going to try to pedal this into the market, market, either someone would have to give it to a poacher. I mean, the poacher's going to know they didn't kill the rhino. So if you gave this to a poacher and said, hey, you can hand this off to a fence and make 160 or $260,000 by selling it, that poacher is putting their life in danger. Because if anyone finds out that it's a fake, the criminal world that's responsible for collecting the horns and then selling them would be very, very angry and it would probably have life threatening consequences. So, and this is certainly not a task for a research team at Oxford, this is a task for governments to be able to get the false rhino horns to folks who could then weave their way clandestinely into the trade network and start pushing the false rhino horns without anyone at the other end realizing what was actually happening. And that is both the most dangerous and the most difficult part of this.

And so essentially, government actors, spy types, will try to sort of sneak these into the market. I mean, is there a precedent for this?

Yeah. So there is a history to this. Not with rhino horns and not with animal parts at all. But During World War II, there was an attempt by the Germans under the Nazi regime to try to flood, I believe it was Britain, with enormous amounts of counterfeit currency to try to plunge the pound, not plunge the pound, but to deflate the pound so that it was worth next to nothing and ruin the British economy. So the tactic by the Nazis didn't work. We don't know if this will work with the rhinos. Certainly it's a supply and demand situation. And because rhino horns are so damn difficult for people to collect, because the poachers are putting their necks on the line to go and get this stuff, if you were to start to increase the presence of rhino horn, more people would be able to get to it. There would be more supply and demand would, in theory, go down. Now, the catch here is it is possible that once rhino horn starts becoming more available, perhaps more people will say, well, hey, I want some. And it might increase demand. And that would be problematic. Of course, you could just start ramping up your, your production of false rhino horn. But again, that takes us into territory we haven't explored yet. We don't know if that would work. But think about it this way. The Asian rhinos are in the hundreds. In some species, it's less than 100. Every single rhino that gets shot and has its horn taken away is that much less genetic diversity that we have to help us climb back out of this hole that we've got ourselves into, we need as much genetic diversity as is as is possible. And if this tactic can even save 50 rhinos during the course of a couple of years, that is something that is worth doing.

Matt, thank you very much for joining us.

It was my pleasure. J.

Everywhere you go these days, it's hard.

Not to bump into soy milk lattes.

Or vegan burgers that bleed with beetroot juices.

But According to the UN, the amount of meat that, for example, Americans and Britons consume has risen by 10% in the past 50 years. All that carnivory has some serious consequences.

So it's no secret that steaks and chops are bad for you and bad for the environment. But the question is, how much and what can you do to mitigate that? And it turns out when you run the numbers and play around with some hypothetical scenarios, it's a bit more nuanced than you might think.

James Tozer is a data journalist for the Economist.

The two main bits that are really bad for the Earth. First, carbon footprint. Cows and livestock generally give off an enormous amount of methane through their faults and burps. But also land use. It's a very inefficient use of land. If you look at the amount that a stake takes to produce relative to, say, a bowl of peas, it's about 100 times as much land. And that comes with things like deforestation and so on.

And the simplistic view is by simply stopping eating meat, that we could mitigate most of these problems.

That is the typical view. And there's a paper out by a bunch of scientists at Johns Hopkins which tries to unpack that a little bit and sort of game it out. What would happen if you gave up certain kinds of meat, if you went vegetarian or vegan and so on? There's a little bit more nuance to it. They find that if you go from a normal diet to vegetarian, their sort of simulations suggest that you'll try and make up a lot of the protein that you'd lose from meat by eating eggs and dairy, which sort of. It doesn't really deal with the environmental problems too much because you're still having to farm the livestock. And so what they actually found is if you took two potential diets, one in which you keep eating meat but get rid of dairy and eggs, and one in which you go veggie but keep the dairy and eggs, they're about the same in terms of the amount of carbon that they would produce. What they found is that what you really need to do to make a drastic, drastic reduction is to go vegan. And there they found an enormous reduction. So if you go vegan, you'll cut your food related carbon footprint by something like 90%.

That seems like a fairly drastic option for most people.

Absolutely.

Getting rid of any animal product they like.

Sure.

Giving up burgers for tofu is quite a large lifestyle adjustment. Certainly, as someone who enjoys the odd barbecue, I know I would find it difficult to do. The next best solution is basically to go 2/3 vegan. They found that if you do that, you'd still reduce your carbon footprint enormously by about 60%. And ironically, having a little bit of medication can be better than being full vegetarian. If you cut back enough on the milk and cheese and butter and eggs, you can actually get further to reducing your carbon footprint than you would just by cutting meat and replacing that by other animal products.

And presumably better for your health.

Yeah, much better for your health. If you look at mortality and you take two people, one who eats an extra 50 grams of meat a day, and someone of the same age and background who doesn't, your chances of dying in any given year go up by 40%. So cutting back on a couple of extra chops and steaks each week will give you a much better chance of making it to Christmas.

If everybody in the whole world right.

Now stopped eating meat, stopped eating animal products. Where are we on the whole carbon budget?

If everyone in the world stopped, it would make an enormous difference because you're talking about 7 billion people and you're cutting their food related footprint by 90%. It would make a massive difference. But I think more difficult thing for people in developed countries is that your food footprint relative to the rest of the stuff that you do is much smaller. So, for example, I rather guiltily looked at my carbon footprint by using one of the many online calculators available before writing this article and worked out that the roughly 2 tons or so of carbon dioxide that comes each year from my food is dwarfed by like a factor of 10 by the amount produced by flights for holidays and work trips and so on. So in that respect, for people in the west, it may seem that cutting back on your meat is small potatoes relative to the rest of what you might indulge in over the rest of the year.

James, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you.

That's all from us on the intelligence, but we'd like to know more about you and what you think of the show. Do us a favor and head over to economist.com podsurvey and see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.