The Chinese government has designated traditional medicine production as a strategic industry, a senior technology official told participants at an international conference in Chengdu on Sunday.

Minister of Science and Technology Xu Guanhua said the Chinese government has mapped out a detailed strategy to develop the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) industry. Modernization of the industry has been inscribed in the country's primary agenda for scientific and technological exploration.

The Second International Technology Conference on the Modernization of Chinese Traditional Medicines opened in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, on Sunday, attracting 3,000 government and corporate representatives from 43 countries.

Vice minister of Science and Technology Liu Yanhua made a keynote speech at the conference, saying that international demand for TCM has risen dramatically in recent years, which has boosted the industry's adoption of science and technology.

The country's production value of TCM amounted to 95.8 billion yuan (about US$12 billion) in 2004, up 18.3 percent from the previous year.

Liu said net yield and profits of TCM production is much higher than the average for the country's medical industry.

The country has built 14 technological development bases and eight demonstration plantation bases of traditional medicine in the last five years, Liu said.

So far, there are some 1,000 varieties of medicinal herbs available on the market, 150 strains of which are artificially cultivated. Plantations are about one million hectares in total nationwide, representing a 90 percent increase from the year 2000. Liu said China has developed a cultivation technology for some 500 varieties of medicinal herbs.

The plantations have become a new source of income for Chinese farmers in backward mountainous regions.

(Xinhua News Agency, China.org.cn September 26, 2005)