Digging deep: grappling with water shortage in China
On 8 February 2011 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) issued a rare “special alert”, warning that an extreme drought threatened the wheat harvest in China, the world’s largest wheat grower.
The FAO said that the drought affected more than a third of China’s 14 million ha of wheat and left 2.57 million people and 2.79 million livestock short of water.
Photo: The dried up water reservoir of Hongshiyun village in a rural area of Yunnan province, China. Source: Remko Tanis on Flickr
“China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world – if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” Robert Zeigler, director general of the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), told the New York Times.
Adding to the seriousness of the situation was speculation that food price increases had helped fuel unrest in the Middle East in early 2011 – as they did in 2008 when a rapid increase in the cost of staples, especially rice, had triggered food riots in parts of Asia and Africa.
In January 2011, a price index of 55 export food commodities tracked by the FAO reached its highest level since the index began in 1990. The main factors affecting prices were said to be weather patterns, increased demand, reduced yields and the displacement of food commodities by biofuel crops.
The drought in China, which produces one sixth of the global wheat output, came on the heels of calamities to two of the world’s major wheat exporters – droughts in Russia and extensive damage to crops in Australia as a result of heavy rain.
Photo: About 40 percent of the water Beijing uses every year comes out of the Miyun reservoir, a ninety-minute drive north of Beijing. But the reservoir is visibly drying up. Source: Bert van Dijk on Flickr.
The day of the FAO alert, Xinhua, China’s official news agency, announced that the country’s grain belt faced its worst drought in 60 years. It said the water shortage was severe in Anhui, Hebei, Henan, Jiangsu, Shandong and Shanxi provinces which had seen almost no rain since October 2010.
The provinces – all in China’s northeast – accounted for some 80 percent of the country’s wheat production. China Dialogue, an environmental NGO, reported in October 2010 that per capita drinking water resources in the Chinese capital have sunk to 4 percent of the global average.
“Minimal rainfall or snow this winter has crippled China’s major agricultural regions, leaving many of them parched,” said Xinhua, adding that crop production had fallen sharply as a result.
China had some 55 million tonnes of stockpiled wheat (the equivalent of half the annual harvest), but the authorities were sufficiently concerned by the drought to set aside 6.7 billion yuan (US$1 billion) in emergency aid to dig wells, divert water, improve irrigation and compensate struggling farmers.
By early March it was clear that the huge intervention, along with timely rain and snow in late February, had saved much of the country’s wheat crop, which was emerging from its winter dormancy. However, the abnormally dry winter – in some parts of China the driest for more than a century – underscored a deeper issue: the ongoing depletion of the country’s water reserves.
Rapid industrialisation has resulted in a heightened demand for water by factories and power plants and by an increasingly affluent population able to afford reticulated water for washing machines, private bathrooms, gardens and car washing.
The Guardian newspaper’s Jonathan Watts neatly encapsulated the problem in a February 2011 story: “On the outskirts of Sishui – which translates as Four Waters due to its historic abundance of rivers and springs – villagers complain that they are not allowed to use the Si River that runs past their homes because the water is earmarked for the Huajin paper mill and an artificial lake in a nearby urban development.”
Hundreds of cities are consequently facing water shortages, including the capital, Beijing, which has a deficit of 200-300 million cubic metres and which is tapping underground water to meet its needs. As a result of such measures, the water table in the arid northern plain – home to some 200 million people and to fast-growing megacities such as Beijing and Tianjin – has fallen to between 11 and 24 metres below sea level over the past decade, according to Xinhua.
The World Bank has warned that such practices are unsustainable and that without urgent changes in water use, tens of millions of Chinese will become environmental refugees.
In 2010, CNN reported that China’s feverish dam-building activities (the country has some 87,000 dams) to secure water supply were stressing countries downriver, including Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam.
“Those other countries also lack the money or political ability to build dams as quickly as China has. Chinese officials routinely build infrastructure and relocate residents despite opposition,” said CNN.
By far the largest scale response by the Chinese Government to the chronic water shortage is the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, a massive engineering scheme to channel water from the Yangtze River through a network of pipes, tunnels and canals to the dry north of the country via three routes: eastern, middle and western.
Photo: Work is ongoing on the South-to-North Water Diversion Project. Source: Bert van Dijk on Flickr.
The Mapping the World Project, a joint research venture by Bologna University and the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique, has produced a useful map outlining the routes and showing the natural processes that are exacerbating China’s water imbalance: creeping desertification in the north and flooding in the south caused by Himalayan ice melt due to global warming (two-thirds of the region’s glaciers are forecast to vanish by 2050).
The BBC’s Damian Grammaticas, who saw at first hand a number of China’s countless empty dams, including one on the floor of which villagers had planted crops, says the vast water diversion project was a stopgap measure at best.
“The amount of water it will deliver will buy China time to change and, hopefully, become more efficient,” he wrote in March 2011.
“But it won’t be enough to solve the country’s water woes. China’s thirst is just too great, and unless it alters its ways, millions might find one day that their water could run dry.”
A glorious time to be an engineer
-
Mao Zedong stated the theory behind the project in 1952, saying: “The south has plenty of water and the north lacks it, so if possible why not borrow some?”
-
China’s current President, Hu Jintao, is a trained hydro-engineer.
-
In February 2011, Xinhua reported that 6.7 million hectares of farmland across China are suffering from the drought.
-
Estimated total cost of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project is US$60 billion (three times more than the Three Gorges Dam project).
-
The project began in 2002 with ground breaking for the eastern route.
-
A tunnel on the eastern route will allow water from the Yangtze River to flow under the Yellow River.
-
Scheduled to be finished in 2050, it will have taken 100 years from conception to completion.
-
When the central section opens in 2014, it will deliver water 1,400 km to Beijing and other northern cities.
-
The villagers of Machuan, which was bulldozed in August 2010, are the first of more than 330,000 rural dwellers who will be displaced during construction of the project’s middle route section. The water diversion project was reported by Associated Press to be the biggest population relocation project in China since the Three Gorges Dam.
- by Vaughan Yarwood