From this February, China is to impose a full commercial fishing ban along the Yangtze River, the country's longest, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture said Friday.

The ban will cover 10 provinces and municipalities along 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.

Qi Jingfa, vice agricultural minister, said the ban would take effect from February to April in the upper reaches of the river from Yunnan Province in the southwest 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.

China expected the ban would help reverse decades of overfishing and pollution on the river, Qi said.

According to official statistics, the river's annual take of wild fish had fallen to about 100,000 tons a year, only about one fourth of what Yangtze fishermen routinely caught in 1954.

The Yangtze River, from its headwaters high on the Tibetan plateau, develops into the world's third largest river as it cuts across China. Its fishing catch accounts for 60 percent of the country's total freshwater fish output.

(Xinhua News Agency January 10, 2003)