China reduced the number of non-oil-gas mine enterprises by 325 to 126,370 through overall planning last year, the Ministry of Land and Resources said on Monday.

The ministry's statistics on the exploitation and use of mineral resources by mine enterprises showed that the total number of mine enterprises continued to decline last year thanks to stringent overall planning and policies that tightened the issuance of exploitation permissions related to 8 minerals, including thulium, tungsten, stannum, antimony, coal, molybdenum, barite and fluorite.

Streamlining the production of various resources also helped to reduce the number of small mine enterprises and increase large ones, said the ministry.

The aggregate volume of exploited mineral ores reached 5.833 billion tons, an increase of 585 million tons compared with 2005, the ministry said.

The coal and iron ore exploited by all the non-oil-gas mine enterprises in 2006 totaled 1.962 billion tons and 424 million tons respectively, according to the ministry.

(Xinhua News Agency August 28, 2007)