“It is of vital importance for China to enhance the protection and management of crocodilian resources after indigenous Chinese alligators narrowly escaped extinction through the state’s protection and conservation efforts since 1983,” a deputy director of the State Forestry Administration (SFA) said.

Addressing an international workshop on captive breeding and commercial management of crocodiles, Ma Fu told more than 80 officials and experts that China will further push forwards the protection, growth and sustainable use of crocodile resources through links with other countries.

The workshop included some 40 foreign scholars from the Crocodile Specialist Group of the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) - the largest of its kind in the world.

Since the early 1980s, China has initiated a special program to save the Chinese alligator by establishing a nature reserve with a breeding and research center in Wuhu, east China’s Anhui Province.

The population of Chinese alligators bred in captivity has surged to more than 10,000 with more than 1,500 individuals being reared annually.

In the Anhui center, the reptiles are living in a 433-square-km nature reserve which is their only protection zone in the country, said Wang Chaolin, director of the Chinese Alligator Breeding Research Center.

So far, more than 80 Chinese alligators have been returned to the wild with a survival rate of about 50 percent. The center has set aside four zones near the reserve as future homes for reptiles.

It has been conducting a series of research programs on the returned alligators. Zoological experts are also working to improve awareness on the need to protect Chinese alligators.

Twenty years ago there were fewer than 300 Chinese alligators remaining in the wild, mainly in Anhui and Zhejiang provinces.

To ensure a gradual and sustainable growth of the population of crocodilian, China has also tightened its control over the introduction, breeding and wise use of exotic crocodilian with higher economic values.

The skin of the crocodile is highly valued for its deluxe leather, and the extract from the musk glands is used in the manufacture of perfumes.

Due to over-hunting, most of the world’s existing 20 species of crocodilian, including Chinese alligators, are considered endangered species

(China Daily 09/03/2001)