2023-04-20 23:55:00
The Government of Sri Lanka this Thursday defended an agreement with a Chinese company to send 100,000 monkeys of an endangered species, but considered harmful to agricultural crops, which will be displayed in zoos.
“A Chinese company has placed an order to display them in zoos,” said Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Gunadasa Samarasinghe, during a televised speech.
The official explained that the monkeys will not be sent all at once, “but in batches”, and that they will not be captured in forest areas dedicated to conservation, but to cultivation, where “these animals seriously damage crops”.
Samarasinghe assured that the Chinese Government “has nothing to do” with the proposal, made by a company during a business visit to Sri Lanka, and recently presented by the Minister of Agriculture, Mahinda Amaraweera.
This proposal has drawn criticism from animal rights groups, especially as the endemic Sri Lankan macaque species is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The Chinese government also distanced itself from this plan, and the Chinese embassy in Colombo said this Wednesday, in a statement, that Beijing “always attaches great importance to the protection of wildlife”.
Sri Lanka remains mired in the worst financial crisis it has faced since independence from the British Empire in 1948 and requested help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in March last year.
Both parties reached an initial agreement for the urgent bailout last September.
The crisis that the island has been experiencing for more than a year is partly attributed to erroneous fiscal policies and the very high indebtedness, to which is added the drop in foreign exchange earnings during the covid-19 pandemic.
The Asian nation has a debt of about six billion dollars (about 5,470 million euros) annually for the next five years, ten times more than the foreign currency reserves available at the moment.
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