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Fishing ban imposed on Yangtze River
( 2002-01-08 16:03 ) (8 )

This spring, for the first time ever there will be a commercial fishing ban along the Yangtze River, China's longest river, the Ministry of Agriculture said on Tuesday.

The ban will cover the 4,251-kilometer mainstream of the Yangtze River which has been divided into upper and lower areas by the Ministry to enable the ban to be imposed at different times.

The ban will take affect from February to April in the upper reaches of the river from southwest China's Yunnan Province to central China's Hubei Province and from April to June in the lower reaches of the river from Hubei to east China's Shanghai, said Zhang Hecheng, vice-director of the Fishery Bureau under the Ministry.

It is expected that the three-month ban will help reverse decades of overfishing and pollution on the river, he said.

Overfishing threatens not only the livelihood of thousands of fishermen, but also one of the planet's rarest animals -- the Yangtze River dolphin.

It is thought less than 100 of these dolphins are now left in the Yangtze River, their only natural habitat. The endangered dolphin is one of only four freshwater dolphin species in the world.

The river's annual take of wild fish has fallen to about 100,000 tons a year, about one fourth of what Yangtze fishermen routinely caught in 1954, according to the Ministry.

From its headwaters high up on the Tibetan plateau, the Yangtze grows into the world's third-largest river as it cuts across China. Its fishing output accounts for 60 percent of the country's total freshwater fishing output.

Since 1995 there has been an annual three-month fishing ban in the Yellow Sea and the East and South China Seas.