The government of the highly indebted crisis-ridden Sri Lanka is considering exporting 100,000 specimens of an endangered monkey species to China. Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera’s recently announced plan to bring Ceylon’s hat monkeys to China has drawn much criticism from animal rights activists.
According to the private Chinese company that wants to import the primates, it wants to procure them for hundreds of Chinese zoos. However, the Chinese embassy in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo emphasizes that the Chinese government has not received any applications for animal imports.
Nonetheless, Sri Lanka’s Minister of Agriculture, Amaraweera, said the export would be considered given the great damage caused by the monkeys in agriculture. For example, there is damage to coconut plantations, which bring in a lot of money for the country when exported. Recently, however, monkeys have destroyed a considerable part of the harvest – partly because people are increasingly advancing into the animals’ habitat.
Concern for animal rights activists
At the same time, the monkeys are on the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This is a status with no legal implications, an IUCN spokeswoman said when asked. A state may export the animals if, in the opinion of a state scientific authority, this is not harmful to the survival of the species. In Sri Lanka itself, the animals are not protected, they only occur there in the wild.
Animal rights activists in Sri Lanka now fear the 100,000 monkeys could be used for research or end up as food. For example, the Sri Lanka’s Wildlife and Nature Protection Society called on the government to refrain from exporting and instead to find other solutions to limit the monkey population.
Sri Lankan Situation
The island state south of India with around 22 million inhabitants is currently plagued by financial worries. The country slipped into the worst economic crisis in decades last year and has been struggling with food and energy shortages ever since, and food prices have risen sharply.
Mass protests last summer led to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s flight abroad and his resignation. Sri Lanka recently secured a four-year loan program from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for around three billion dollars. But that is not enough to solve the crisis.
