Published by: World Tibet Network News Wednesday February 28, 1996

By Jane Macartney

BEIJING, Feb 27 (Reuter) - Up to 60,000 Tibetan herders and their families are facing starvation and hundreds of thousands of yaks have died in savage winter snowstorms on a west China plateau, officials said on Tuesday.

"We need all the help we can get. The more the better," an official of the Qinghai province government said by telephone from the provincial capital Xining.

The worst casualty reported was one herdsman killed by an avalanche after the weeks of relentless snowstorms and freezing temperatures in Yushu district bordering the Himalayan region of Tibet, another local official said by telephone.

More than 14,000 people have suffered frostbite or snow-blindness in Yushu, which lies about 3,500 metres (11,400 feet) above sea level, the government official said.

He said some 60,000 herders and their families were on the verge of starvation, with many of their yaks killed by the cold and most communications cut to the remote plateau which is inhabited mainly by ethnic Tibetans.

More than 100,000 people have been affected by storms that have battered Yushu since late 1995 and 60,000 of these faced extreme shortages of food, medicine and firewood, he said.

The area affected by the disaster covers about 130,000 square km (50,000 square miles) of one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of China, where temperatures have plunged to minus 47 degrees Celsius (minus 52 Fahrenheit).

More than 650,000 of the Tibetans' hardy, long-haired yaks that produce their staple milk have died in the extreme cold and 1.95 million face starvation, the official said.

"We expect one million animals to have died by the time spring comes in May," he said. "It is no longer possible to try to save the cattle, only the people. This is one of our worst snow disasters in recent years."

Snow blocking most roads to the area was hampering rescue efforts and limiting the amount of aid that could be sent to the region. "This is a place where the snow sometimes does not melt the whole year round," he said.

The Qinghai government had allocated aid worth 2.0 million yuan ($240,000) to help the beleaguered herdsmen, he said.

Canada had sent 300,000 yuan ($36,000) worth of aid but this was not enough, he said.

Another local official said relief teams were rushing about 15 tonnes of grain, mostly barley, each day to 34 affected counties and towns.

Soldiers of the People's Liberation Army had been mobilised to help with the relief work and medical teams from hospitals in Xining had been sent to the area, he said.