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 snow 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 before met with such a disaster.

Operating more than 80 hectares of fishponds, Lin has chalked up more than 1 million yuan (US$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 northern 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.

Similarly, 339 houses have collapsed under the snow, and a further 395 have been damaged.

At Guangzhou railway station, more than 400 railway police officers have fallen ill after working nonstop for up to seven days in the cold, trying to keep order among the multitude of stranded travelers, officials said.

As of yesterday evening, railway departments in the province said they had paid refunds on more than 500,000 tickets.

At Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport yesterday, about 14,000 passengers were stranded due to the cancellation of 35 flights and delays to 125 others.

Officials from the airport and China Southern Airlines said they are doing all they can to make the stranded passengers' stay as comfortable as possible.

Zhang Kejian, the airport's general manger, said flights will resume as soon as the weather permits.

(China Daily January 31, 2008)