Captive giant pandas in the Sichuan province of China have had their bamboo rations cut by almost a half in the midst of the breeding season because of damage to forests during last month’s earthquake.

Dozens more were being moved from a breeding centre near the epicentre of the earthquake because of food shortages and the threat of landslides, local officials told The Times.

The plight of the endangered pandas is a footnote to the human cost of the earthquake last month, which the Government says killed 69,181 people and left 18,498 missing and five million homeless. It is, nonetheless, an important concern for a country that has adopted the panda as an unofficial national symbol.

Only 1,590 pandas live in the wild, all in China, and about 1,400 were in the region hit by the earthquake, which destroyed an estimated 8 per cent of their habitat, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Another 239 live in captivity in China, including 130 in Sichuan. One of those died in the earthquake, 14 were injured and 63 in the mountainous Wolong nature reserve were facing serious food shortages, according to a statement sent to The Times by the Sichuan forestry department.

Officials at another panda centre in Chengdu, the provincial capital, said that they were having to ration bamboo for their 67 pandas. Giant pandas normally eat 15-20kg of bamboo every day but the Chengdu centre is feeding them just over half that amount and topping up their diet with fruit and animal feed, they said.

The bamboo shortage is particularly worrying because it comes in the middle of the breeding season, when pandas need to eat more.

A director of the Wolong reserve said that he had just enough bamboo to feed his remaining pandas but was supplementing their diet with milk, cookies, fruit and corn bread. “We’ve moved more than half of the pandas to other safer places,” he said.

Times Recommends

• Michael Jackson: Not the final chapter
• Indian Army spends10m rupees on golf buggies
• Brüno toned down for 15 rating