20 Asia The EconomistFebruary 24th 2018
12 Yet some of the BJP’s economic moves
raise questions about its commitment to
reform. Earlier this month, for instance, Mr
Modi’s government quietly abandoned
plans to relax a “licence Raj” rule that ob-
liges any firm with more than 100 employ-
ees to seek governmentpermission to fire
any staff. Speaking in Davos in January, Mr
Modi repeatedly declared India’s commit-
ment to open competition in a globalised
world. A week later his finance minister
unveiled a budget that sharply hikes tariffs
on a broad range of goods. Duty on import-
ed sugar is now 100%.
Following a series of apparent recent
setbacks, Indian pundits are also growing
increasingly critical of Mr Modi’s foreign
policy. Having promised a more robust
and active stance, the prime minister has
delivered mostly bluster. India’s biggest ri-
val, China, continues to make strategic in-
roads into India’s traditional sphere of in-
fluence. Iron-fist tactics to squelch unrest in
the state of Jammu and Kashmir seem only
to have deepened local alienation.
So far, all this has done the BJPlittle
harm. It still dominates politics, despite a
slight dip in the polls. But Congress has
benefited from a commensurate uptick
and its leader, Rahul Gandhi, has cut Mr
Modi’s lead as preferred prime minister
from 35 percentage points to 17. Perhaps
even as the BJPsuccumbs to some of Con-
gress’s foibles, Congress is learning new
tricks from the BJP. 7M
OST deforestation takes place in poor
countries. In richer places, trees tend
to multiply. Australia is an unhappy excep-
tion. Land clearance is rampant along its
eastern coast, as farmers take advantage of
lax laws to make room for cattle to feed
Asia. WWF, a charity, now ranks Australia
alongside Borneo and the Congo Basin as
one of the world’s 11 worst “fronts” for de-
forestation.
The worst damage occurs in the north-
eastern state of Queensland, which has
more trees left to fell than places to the
south, where agriculture is more estab-
lished. Ithas been responsible forover half
of Australia’s land clearance since the
1970s. Its bulldozersare at present busier
than they have been for a decade. They
erased 395,000 hectares of forest, includ-
ing huge tracts of ancient vegetation, be-
tween 2015 and 2016—the equivalent of
1,000 rugbypitches a day. As a share of itsforested area, Queensland is mowing
down trees twice as fast as Brazil.
Australia has lost almost half its native
forest since British colonialists arrived, and
much of what remains is degraded. For a
time, it seemed that the clear-cutting might
come to an end: in the early 2000s several
state governments passed bills to reduce
deforestation. But in the past decade these
have been wound back in every state.
Queensland’s land clearance has more
than doubled since conservatives loos-
ened its forestry law in 2013, allowing farm-ers to “thin” trees by up to 75% without a
permit. Neighbouring New South Wales
recently enacted a similar rule.
Conservationists blame powerful agri-
cultural lobbies. These retort that controls
on land clearance push up food prices and
cost jobs. Family farmers lament that trees
obstruct the big machinery needed to keep
their land productive. They know that
empty fields are worth perhaps five times
more than those peppered with vegeta-
tion. In 2014 a landowner in New South
Wales murdered an environment officerDeforestation in AustraliaChainsaw
massacre
Sydney
Queensland is cutting down 1,
rugby pitches’ worth of forest every dayOrangutansMoney swinging from trees
T
HEY move with ease. In the shade of
the jungle, a round-bellied orangutan
glides towards the ground. Her long
limbs give her a gangly appearance, but
the flaming strands of her hair are beauti-
ful. Mina is a notoriously bad-tempered
ape, who has scratched and bitten doz-
ens of locals on the Indonesian island of
Sumatra. But humans harm orangutans
far more than orangutans harm humans.
Estimating the number of orangutans
is difficult. Researchers have to extrapo-
late from the number ofnests observed.
(The apes build new ones to sleep in each
night.) A new study published in Current
Biologyfinds that the number of orang-
utans on Borneo, an island divided be-
tween Indonesia and Malaysia, declined
by some 148,000 between 1999 and 2015,
leaving fewer than 100,000. Within the
next 30 years, another 45,000 could
disappear. The decline has been steepest,
naturally, in areas where the jungle has
been razed to plant palm-oil trees. But it is
areas that are still forested that account
for most of the fall in the orangutan pop-
ulation. This suggests that hunting and
crueller activities—carcasses have been
found maimed and riddled with airgun
pellets—are also taking a bloody toll, says
one of the study’s authors, Maria Voigt of
the Max Planck Institute, a research orga-
nisation in Germany.
People have long since supplanted
other creatures as the greatest threat to
orangutans. The tigers which sometimes
kill Sumatran orangutans (there are no
tigers in Borneo) have become even rarer
than the apes. The jungle guides strum-
ming guitars at a bar in the Sumatran
village of Bukit Lawang know of just one
peer who has seen a tiger in the wild.
More than half ofthe island’s forestcover
has disappeared since the 1980s.
Local officials still push for more
palm-oil plantations, mines and roads.
But tourism in Sumatra’s Gunung-LeuserNational Park shows the value of leaving
the jungle, and itsinhabitants, alone. A
night and two days of climbing and
crawling in search of orangutans can cost
a visitor around $100. Those leading
tours receive a hefty chunk of this and are
therefore well-paid by local standards,
says Dodi Perangin Angin, who runs a
trekking company which employs 13
guides. Tourism is far better for the local
economy than palm oil, he reckons.
Eco-tourism can benefit orangutans,
too, if controlled. But tourists often get too
close to the animals, risking the transmis-
sion of disease, orleave rubbish in the
forest, says Serge Wich of Liverpool John
Moores University. In 2016 he was part of
a team which found that there were more
than 14,000 apes on the island, far more
than the 6,600 or so previously thought.
In spite of the revision, this is a minuscule
number given the island’s vast size (it is
bigger than Japan or Germany). And
unless local officials begin to grasp the
potential of tourism, their numbers are
likely to dwindle even more.Bukit Lawang
Harming orangutans also hurts peopleA hairy orange meal ticket