OSLO, April 10 (Xinhua) -- The Norwegian government announced on Wednesday a proposal for a new law that prohibits the keeping of fur animals by 2025.
The bill presented to parliament would ban the keeping of animals solely or primarily for the animals or their offspring to be killed for the sale or other exploitation of their fur, according to the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
The bill contains a proposal that producers who kept fur animals on Jan. 15, 2018, can continue with this until Feb. 1, 2025, the ministry said in a statement.
It also proposed that the law authorize regulation on compensation for loss of the right to keep fur animals and on subsidies for conversion to other activities.
The Norwegian fur farmers' organisation said in a statement that it was shocked that the government was now presenting an "equally poor" bill after many complaints had been made during the consultation period.
"This is a process that destroys life. Yet, the government has used it all this time constructing reasons, rather than investigating and getting facts on the table," Bertran Trane Skadsem, chairman of the Norwegian Fur Breeders Association, was quoted as saying.
In the original proposal sent for consultation, the government suggested compensation framework of just over 300 million Norwegian kroner (35 million U.S. dollars), which both bank Sparebank 1 and consulting company Klepp Regnskapslag warned would make a large proportion of fur breeders into debt slaves, said the fur farmers' organisation.
It cited two new analysis as stating that it will cost at least 2.3 billion Norwegian kroner for settlement of the fur industry.
In the government's new proposal, all academic inputs are overlooked and the compensation has been adjusted by only 79 million Norwegian kroner, the organisation said. (1 U.S. dollar = 8.50 Norwegian kroner)
