Finnish Zoo to Send Loan Pandas Back to China
A zoo in Finland has agreed with Chinese authorities to return two giant pandas to China more than eight years early.
That's because the animals, who had been loaned to the zoo, have become too expensive for the facility to look after.
The private Ahtari Zoo in central Finland, about 330 kilometers north of Helsinki, said on its Facebook page that the pandas will return to China later this year.
The pandas were a gift from China to mark Finland's 100 years of independence in 2017, and they were supposed to be on loan until 2033.
But since then the zoo has experienced a number of challenges, including decreasing visitor numbers caused by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as an increase in inflation and interest rates, the facility said.
The panda deal between Helsinki and Beijing, a 15-year loan agreement, had been finalized in April 2017 when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Finland. The pandas arrived in Finland in January 2018.
The zoo, which specializes in northern European animals such as bears, lynxes and wolverines, built a special panda area at a cost of $9 million in the hope of bringing more tourists to the remote nature reserve.
Looking after the pandas costs the zoo almost $1.7 million a year. That includes an annual fee paid to China that's thought to be more than $1 million.
Pandas need to eat between 12 and 38 kilograms of bamboo per day. The bamboo that the giant pandas eat is flown in from the Netherlands.
The Chinese Embassy in Helsinki said that it had tried to help the zoo solve its financial difficulties by encouraging Chinese companies in Finland to make donations.
Finland, a country of 5.6 million people, was among the first Western nations to establish political ties with China, doing so in 1950.
