The government will provide enough, safe drinking water for people living in the remote countryside of south China's Guangdong Province, said a senior provincial official at a recent conference.

Ou Guangyuan, deputy secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Guangdong Provincial Committee, told the conference that as many as 1.8 million villagers suffer from water shortages and 16 million people do not have access to clean water supply in the province. The government plans to resolve the problem in three to five years, he said.

More water resources in the province were contaminated by poisonous minerals such as fluorine and arsenic from industrial plants and households, said the official.

As a result, many diseases of skin, teeth and thyroid glands were reported in the rural areas.

Official sources said that in some villages of Guangdong's Shantou and Maoming cities, no young candidates ever passed the physical examination for military conscription since 1989 because of liver problems.

Social experts said that the gaps were widening between prosperous cities and the remote countryside in Guangdong, an economic powerhouse of China.

The government plans to strengthen support for water supply construction in the province, and as part of the plan, a fund of 868 million yuan (US$105 million) was spent on 345 drinking water works in rural areas that cover 5.54 million farmers.

If the plan goes smoothly, all the rural population in Guangdong are likely to use clean drinking water by 2010, Ou said.

(Xinhua News Agency May 27, 2004)