COMMENTARY
INTERVIEWS
SPECIALS
CHAT
ARCHIVES

Greens step up campaign against illegal trade in shatoosh shawls

In perhaps the first ever conviction in the history of a worldwide campaign against the smuggling of shatoosh shawls, made in Jammu and Kashmir using the wool of the endangered Tibetan antelope, a court in Hong Kong has recently fined some traders 25,000 Hong Kong dollars and confiscated 45 shawls.

Manoj Mishra, director of Traffic India, a trade monitoring unit of WWF-Iindia, said the Hong Kong example should be a pointer to Indian authorities who have failed to make any conviction in spite of a large number of seizures and arrests of traders illegally selling shatoosh shawls.

''Also, the fact that the state of Jammu and Kashmir continues to ply the trade, is a matter of great concern for conservationists in India who have taken against the illegal trade of shatoosh,'' he said.

Switzerland, the only other government which allowed the trade of shatoosh, finally banned it on December 21, 1998.

According to Mishra, J&K, as a consequence of the Switzerland development, now stands isolated from the rest of the global community with regard to the conservation of the Tibetan antelope.

Shatoosh is a fine wool extracted from the Tibetan antelope. Each Tibetan antelope yields about 150 grams of shahtoosh. If wastages while spinning are included, as many as five or more tibetan antelopes are killed for every shawl sold illegally in the market at a very high value.

Most of the wool used in J&K is smuggled from the Tibetan plateau where the antelope is slaughtered illegally by poachers. The J&K government has been overlooking several appeals calling for a ban on the trade of shatoosh, Mishra claimed.

UNI

Business news

Jammu and Kashmir