The Sri Lankan government defended on Thursday an agreement to send 100,000 monkeys of a species endangered but considered harmful to crops to a Chinese company, to be shown in zoos; Beijing for its part has distanced itself from the controversy.
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“A Chinese company petitioned to display them in zoos.“said the secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Gunadasa Samarasinghe, during a television intervention.
The officer justified that the jumpsuits will not be shipped at one time, “but in batches, and we will not capture these monkeys from forest areas dedicated to conservation, but to cultivation, where these animals seriously damage plantations.”
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Samarasinghe said the Chinese government “has nothing to do” with the proposal, made by a company during a business visit to the indebted country, and recently unveiled by Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera.
The proposal has drawn criticism from animal rights groups, especially because Sri Lankan endemic monkey species is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
He The Chinese government has also distanced itself from the plan, and the Chinese embassy in Colombo said yesterday in a statement that Beijing “always attaches great importance to the protection of wildlife.”
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Sri Lanka still mired in its worst financial crisis it has faced since its independence from the British Empire in 1948 and requested IMF assistance in March last year.
Both parties reached a initial agreement for urgent rescue last september.
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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 coronavirus pandemic.
The Asian nation has a indebtedness of about 6,000 million dollars annually for the next five years, ten times more than the foreign exchange reserves available at the moment.
EFE
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