The State Forestry Administration (SFA) issued an emergency notice Sunday to call for more attention to the threat of forest fires, urging 16 provinces and municipalities to establish a daily forest fire reporting mechanism.

"We still face a grave challenge in forest fire prevention," said an official with the administration's forest fire prevention office who refused to be named.

More than 1,200 forest fires have been reported in Guangxi, Fujian, Hunan, Hubei and Zhejiang since January, according to the SFA's latest statistics.

With the dry weather since last summer still lingering in south China, many forests in southern areas bordered or alternated with farmlands, which made it more difficult to control fires because of human negligence, farmers' burning stalk for fertilizer and smoking in the fields, the forestry official said.

According to the emergency notice, the conditions of wild fires, weather and forestry fire prevention should be reported to the SFA from Feb. 16 to March 31 in 16 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, including Beijing, Hebei, Shanxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Chongqing, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou.

The notice also urged local forestry departments to release their monitoring and forecasts of forest fire while working out their emergency plans for possible forest fires.

The forestry administration has dispatched four work teams to fire-prone provinces and areas to inspect the fire prevention work and guide wild fire prevention. Local forestry departments were also urged to carry out their duty of controlling forest fires and to prohibit the public from starting fires in fields.

Earlier January, a forest fire in Yulin City, southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, killed 11 people and destroyed some 93 hectares of woods. The end of last year also saw no ease in forest fires with a supervision satellite detecting frequent blazes in Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces in eastern China, and Hunan province in central China.

(Xinhua News Agency February 16, 2004)