Nearly 2,400 villagers living in the areas will be resettled between this year and next year, leaving the land for growing bamboo for pandas, said Zhang Hemin, director of the reserve's administrative bureau.

With the increase of the reserve's population, local residents had asked for more natural resources from the reserve, which had already affected the habits of the giant pandas living in the wild, and some villagers even poached rare animals and secretly cut down trees in the panda's habitat, Zhang told reporters Thursday.

"The emigration is helpful to the panda's protection and will greatly improve the reserve's ecological system as a whole so as to make the reserve really a 'green paradise' as well as a 'home of giant pandas', " he said.

Zhang said the villagers would be resettled in a special residential area of the reserve and they are encouraged to enter tourism service, for example running restaurants, and each of them would get a subsidy from the government every month.

About 124 hectares of the villagers' land would be replanted with bamboo, the favorite food of the endangered pandas, he said.

As China's largest protective zone for the giant panda, the Wolong Nature reserve, not far from Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, is home to about 100 wild giant pandas and more than 60 artificially-bred ones.

There are only about 1,000 giant pandas left in the wild, mainly in the hilly areas in China's Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi Provinces.

(Xinhua News Agency June 26, 2003)