A government decree is being drafted for presentation to Greenland's local parliament, Frederiksen told AFP, adding: "We expect to announce new rules this summer when we'll set an annual cull quota."

Greenland's some 2,700 professional hunters have in recent years sought financial aid from the government to make up for shrinking numbers of animals as a result of global warming.

Warmer temperatures have already melted much of the ice that constitutes polar bears' main hunting grounds, making it more difficult for them to access seals, walruses and narwhals (small Arctic whales), the staple of their diet.

Bardot wrote an open letter to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, of which Greenland is a dependent territory, protesting plans to allow rich tourists to shoot the bears and keep their pelts as souvenirs in what she called a planned "massacre of this mythical symbol of the frozen north."

But Deputy Prime Minister Josef Motzfeld said that the measure would help the hard-hit hunters to supplement their incomes. "This could be a good way for bear hunters to make more money on their pelts," he said.

Greenlandic polar bear hunters currently make between 6,000 and 9,000 kroner (1,055-1,580 dollars, 806-1,210 euros) per pelt on the local market. By contrast, hunters in Canada, the only country in the world that currently allows tourists to hunt polar bears, can bring in as much as 150,000 kroner for a souvenir pelt.

Environment Minister Jens Napaattoq said he would like the world's largest island, which already allows Greenlandic professional hunters to kill a certain number of polar bears each year, to set the annual souvenir quota at 30 animals.

"We already have a souvenir quota for musk oxen (350 animals in 2005), so why not have one for bears?" agreed the president of Greenland's association of fishermen and hunters, Leif Fontaine, noting that professional hunters killed 278 polar bears in 2003.

Fontaine said Bardot's appeal to Queen Margrethe can "not be taken seriously" and shows "a total ignorance of reality" about the great north.

"The species is certainly not being threatened with extinction from the rifles of Greenlandic hunters, who live in harmony with nature, but rather from those responsible for pollution and global warming," he told AFP.

Bardot said in the letter: "I have been fighting for years to stop the ice shelf being stained with the blood of thousands of seals shamelessly exterminated in Canada and Norway. ... Your country also seems to want to leave its stamp on the ice shelf by causing the blood of these innocent bears to flow, bears whose survival is already threatened by global warming."

The former screen idol is already widely despised on Greenland since her campaign in the 1980s to stop Canadian hunts for baby seals had repercussions on the island's seal hunters.

The Arctic ice cap has shrunk by 17 percent over the last 20 years, according to international experts gathered in Greenlandic capital Nuuk last September.

They said they expected the temperature in the Arctic region to rise by three to nine degrees in the coming 100 years and predicted that the inland ice would melt altogether in 200 to 400 years.

Man-made chemicals also pose a serious threat to the estimated 22,000 to 27,000 polar bears spread across the Arctic region, harming their immune and reproductive systems, the conservation agency WWF warned last year.

Wealthy tourists, eager to bring a pelt back with them as proof of their exotic conquest, should be able to pull the trigger for the first time on September 1 when Greenland's polar bear hunting season begins.

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