KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia on Friday said it has lifted a 23-year ban on the export of long-tailed macaques because their population has grown to be an urban nuisance.

Natural resources and environment minister Azmi Khalid said only monkeys in urban areas could be caught and exported.

"The cabinet has decided to lift the ban which was imposed in 1984 on the capture and export of this type of monkeys," Azmi told a news conference.

"This is because we want to reduce the number of long-tailed monkeys in urban areas," adding that they often "create havoc" there and attack people and steal food.

The lifting of the ban however is only in mainland Malaysia and does not cover Sabah and Sarawak, he said.

Azmi said a study by his office found there were more than 258,000 macaques living in urban areas in the mainland and nearly 484,000 in the wild.

Meanwhile the New Straits Times newspaper reported that the government was in negotiations on possibly exporting the primates to Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

As many as 10,000 of these macaques were exported each year in the 1970s, mainly for laboratory research in the United States and Europe and to other countries as exotic food or pets.

The trade led to a drop in the macaque population and subsequently forced the government to impose the ban in the mid-1980s. - AFP/ac