Panda death risk increasing

Press, 17 May 1984, Page 12

Panda death risk increasing

NZPA-AP Peking A bamboo die-off threatening to starve China’s giant pandas has worsened, with more than 70 per cent of the plant withered in Szechwan province, the Government has disclosed. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said authorities in Szechwan, where most of China’s estimated 1000 pandas live, have decided to build four special panda breeding farms, deputise peasants to search for the starving creatures, and train medical workers at the provincial zoo in Chengdu to become panda rescue squads. Xinhua also said the provincial government has banned hunting and collecting medicinal herbs in areas inhabited by pandas, known in Chinese as “da xiongmao'U— "big bear cats.”

At least 12 pandas have starved to death in southwest China’s mountainous back country since last year, when the arrow bamboo, their favourite food, began to wither and die because of a rare flowering cycle. “The famine is now said to be worsening as the withering of the arrow bamboo continues,” Xinhua said. “Over 200,000 hectares, 70 per cent of the province’s bamboo-growing area, are now believed affected.”

The Government has set up a special panda rescue fund, established special feeding centres and nature preserves, and asked for foreign assistance to save the lumbering creatures, which have come to symbolise beasts threatened with extinction. 1