More than 1 million kg of fish and about 30,000 farmyard ducks in Guangzhou have become the latest victims of the cold weather, officials said yesterday.
Xie Guanqiu, director of the Huadu district bureau of agriculture in Guangzhou, said more than 53,000 hectares of fishponds in the district - 80 percent of the total - have been damaged by the freezing conditions, with large quantities of fish perishing daily since Friday.
Most of the dead fish were crucian carp and other exotic varieties, officials said.
In the district's Tanbu township, some 30,000 ducks have also been killed by the freezing temperatures over the past week.
"The economic damage will worsen if the current bad weather continues," Xie told China Daily yesterday.
Lin Yuhua, who has been breeding fish in the district for more than 20 years, said he has never encountered such a disaster before.
Operating more than 80 hectares of fishponds, Lin has chalked up more than 1 million yuan ($140,000) of losses since the bad weather began.
Huadu district is a major supplier of freshwater fish in the provincial capital of Guangdong. Apart from supplying local markets, the fish are sold to the neighboring Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions.
According to official figures, more than 1.6 million people in Guangzhou have been affected by the cold weather.
Of those, 181,000 in the sorthern province have been evacuated from areas hardest hit by the heavy snowfall.
Economic losses in the region have been put at more than 1 billion yuan, with 22,700 hectares of cropland damaged. More than 6,800 hectares have not yielded any harvests at all.
（英语点津 Celene 编辑）
About the broadcaster:
Bernice Chan is a foreign expert at China Daily Website. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Bernice has written for newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong and most recently worked as a broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, producing current affairs shows and documentaries.
