HEAVY snow has killed nearly 25,000 pashmina goats in the Indian Himalayas, threatening supplies of silky cashmere wool used to make high-end scarves.
Thousands of nomads rear the goats in the inhospitable terrain of India's northwestern region of Ladakh, a high-altitude desert renowned for its dramatic landscape of towering mountains and arid plains.
Some 50 tonnes of raw pashmina wool, known to be some of the best in the world, is produced there each year and sent to neighbouring Kashmir, where it is processed and woven into scarves and shawls.
This year, an estimated 25,000 goats have starved to death in the Changthang region because their fodder is buried under unusually heavy snow, said Rigzin Spalbar, who heads the Ladakh Hill Development Council, the autonomous governing body of the region.
"All the land access routes are blocked with snow and a week earlier we requested the government to airdrop fodder and supplements for the surviving goats," Spalbar said by phone.
"It took me seven days on foot to reach a fringe of the area and I saw dead pashmina goats lying all around," Spalbar said, explaining that the only contact with the nomads is through satellite phones.
Another 175,000 goats were at risk of perishing as their fodder was buried under about 90 centimetres of snow after one of the biggest snowfalls in nearly 50 years, he said.
Changthang receives almost no rain during summer and usually about five centimetres of snow in an average winter. Temperatures can drop to minus 50C.
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