BEIJING, March 4(Xinhuanet)-- The two-year fight against the illegal rat poison Dushuqiang has"basically reached its target," said Du Qinglin, Minister of Agriculture.

China has controlled the powerful rat poison, which was once widely used but has been banned as too toxic for general use, Du said in a teleconference.

Though it has been banned since the mid-1990s, scores of peopleare believed to have been killed in China in recent years in accidents or murders involving Dushuqiang.

Chinese authorities launched a nationwide crackdown on the poison two years ago, threatening prison terms and death sentencesfor people who make or sell it.

Authorities destroyed 41 factories in east China's Anhui Province, Central China's Henan and Hubei provinces, and confiscated 250 tons of Dushuqiang, Du said.

The numbers of accidents, victims and deaths involving Dushuqiang in 2004 decreased by 82.9 percent, 85.9 percent and 57.9 percent, respectively over the previous year, according to the Ministry of Health.

Meanwhile, local public security departments has dealt with 6,200 such cases in the two years, involving 8,000 suspects of illegal actions.

While cracking down on illegal rat poison, safer rat poison andadvanced rat killing technologies have been spread. In the past two years, more than 30 million hectares of farmland were applied with safer rat poison, helping save 7 billion kilograms of grain.