Water has hit the headlines amid the sweltering summer heat in
southwest China's Chongqing Municipality and Sichuan Province.
The worst drought in 50 years left 7.5 million people in Chongqing
and 3.1 million people in Sichuan in great thirst.
The water depth in the Chongqing section of the Yangtze River,
China's longest, hit 3.5 meters (11.5 feet), its lowest in 100
years. About 2.5 million hectares, or 6.18 million acres, of crops
were affected. The drought is just a small part of a much-larger
problem.
In rural areas, the situation is grimmer. More than 300 million
people in rural areas are short of clean drinking water and
pollution is so severe that the Ministry of Water Resources
estimates 40 percent of water in the country's 1,300 or so major
rivers is fit only for industrial or agricultural use.
The Ministry's 2003 report revealed that the water condition in
70 percent of cities along the Yellow River failed to meet the
healthy standard while only two lakes out of 11 in the Yangtze
River drainage basin meet water quality standards.
In November 2005, a nitrobenzene spill caused by an explosion at
a PetroChina refinery in northeastern Jilin Province forced
authorities in Harbin, capital of the neighboring Heilongjiang
Province, to temporarily cut water supplies to more than 3 million
local people. The incident prompted the resignation of China's
environmental chief.
Meanwhile, as new industrial developments continue to mushroom,
demand for water is constantly generated. Factories and urban
residents used 34 percent of the nation's water in 2004, up from 25
percent in 1998, according to the Ministry of Water Resources.
Consequently, that has hurt grain production, which fell 8.4
percent to 469.4 million tons during the same period, according to
the National Bureau of Statistics.
"The farmers now face strong competition for water from cities
and industry," said Prof. He Shaoling. Across the whole of the
North China Plain, where half of China's wheat is grown, 3.6
million wells have been sunk, mostly for irrigation. "The aquifer
below is being steadily drained and the water table is 90 meters
below the surface and dropping by three to six meters a year," she
said, adding that cities have dumped untreated pollutants and waste
into the water, making crops wither and the water unusable.
"This will result in the reduction in the quality of life of
agricultural peasants as crop sizes decrease in line with water
availability," she said. "Also, it will undermine the food security
of China. If current agricultural yields and population increases
continue at present rates of expansion, China may be forced to go
to international markets to import staples," she said.
To address China's water shortage and help alleviate drought in
the north, the government is spending almost 500 billion yuan
(US$62.5 billion) on a diversion scheme to ship the water north.
China will build a canal north from the Three Gorges Dam that
ultimately will tunnel under the Yellow River to bring some 38-48
billion cubic meters of water to the dry Yellow, Huaihe, and Haihe
rivers.
"The south-to-north water diversion project will alleviate
shortages in China's northern plain, but it won't come close to
solving them," said Ma Jun. "We should give priority to
conservation because there is now inefficient use of water in
agriculture, in the cities, in the urban and industrial uses along
the river."
China has been a production marvel when it comes to labor costs,
but not for water costs. To produce a unit of GDP, China uses
approximately six times more water than the Republic of Korea and
ten times more than Japan, according to Zhai Haohui, vice minister
of water resources.
"What China needs most is a dependable and safe internal water
supply and a clean environment to act as a stable platform for
sustainable economic growth," he said.
So far the government has adopted a multi-faceted strategy to
the water issue, he said. Water conservation and recycling programs
have been introduced and the water price in major cities including
Beijing raised as part of an attempt to stem demand.
In addition, steps are being taken to curb rapid deforestation
and soil erosion across the country. More innovative forms of water
creation, including artificially seeding clouds with dry ice, are
introduced, and hydropower, which creates large evaporating
reservoirs, is increasingly being replaced with wind power.
"A better management of water resources is also required to
reduce the number of regional fights over water from the Yellow
River," Ma Jun said. "Local officials should be judged not just by
how fast their local economies grow, but also by how well they
protect the environment."
"Water is the lifeline of a country's economy and a regional
economy. Economic growth cannot be allowed to come at a steep
environmental cost. It is time for the government to cope with the
realities of declining water stocks and their implications for the
whole society," he said.
(Xinhua News Agency August 20, 2006)