Northern China Facing Water Disaster

by Antoaneta Bezlova

(IPS) BEIJING -- After years of environmental destruction and two decades of spectacular economic growth, China has severe water problems on its hands. The northern half of the country is drying out and two-thirds of all Chinese cities do not have enough fresh water all year round.

The country is also facing a shortage of water resources and aggravation of water pollution.

These were the issues addressed, this week, by environmental experts and officials all over the world at the International Forum on Integrated Water Management hosted by China.

Among the participants were specialists from Brazil, Mozambique, Iraq and Italy who were on hand to share their expertise in water control and diversion projects.

On the table for discussion was China's grandiose plan to channel water from the mighty Yangtze River to the thirsty north, over three pathways of nearly 1,300 kilometres each.

The official price tag of the project is $58 billion -- more than twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, China's most recent mega-project, which is also the world's largest.

Unlike the Three Gorges Dam, which is being built amid heavy criticism for the lack of public consultation and the suppression of dissenting opinions, the South-to-North Water Transfer Project aims to set an example of new environmental consciousness at the top and showcase China's growing openness to international criticism.

This was evident at the international forum when the vice- minister of the Ministry of Water Resources, Suo Lisheng said: "The traditional development pattern in water conservancy does not suit China's commitment to build a comprehensively well-to-do society in the 21st century."

The water table under the North China Plain, which is the country's agricultural heartland producing over half of China's wheat and a third of its corn, is falling faster than thought.

Over pumping due to unchecked industrial development has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, reducing the amount of water that can be pumped from it to the amount of recharge from rainfall. This has caused cities to sink.

In stark contrast to the water-rich southern regions, northern China which has 40 percent of the country's cultivated land and a third of the population taps only 7.7 percent of the country's water resources.

Ultimately, how China deals with its water problems could affect the whole world.

If the water shortages farmers are now experiencing in the North China Plain cause grain harvests to decline significantly, the country may need to meet its growing demand for food with imports so large they could capsize world markets, driving up food prices.

"By 2030 when our country's population will have reached 1.6 billion people, China's water resources per capita will have dropped to somewhere below 1,700 cubic metres, the warning line for water deficiency," Wu Jisong, director of the Department for Water Resources under the Ministry of Water Resources told the forum.

"Along with trends of changing global climate, the situation would become even more desperate," he warned.

For this reason, there is urgency in the South-to-North Water Transfer Project.

The idea was initially championed by Communist China's founder Mao Zedong fifty years ago.

In 2000, however, it was revived after years of severe drought exacerbated China's water crisis.

In December 2002, the State Council, or China's cabinet, approved the start of the construction of three different routes along the upper, middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze to northern China. Upon completion in 2050, the three diversion routes will bring a total of 40 to 50 billion cubic metres of water annually to the parched north.

At the Beijing international forum, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Environment and Territory, parallels were drawn to great water works of the Untied States, like the California north-to- south water diversion -- tapping the Sierra Nevada mountains to help supply water to arid Southern California.

But China's relentless economic growth, at an average of nine per cent a year since 1978, is having unanticipated spill-off effects on water for its cities.

Unbridled development of industries and the resultant pollution from them has resulted in two-thirds of China's cities having serious shortage of clean drinking water.

As many as 700 million people drink water contaminated with human and animal waste at levels that don't come close to the government's minimum standards.

While central authorities have ordered a series of clean-up campaigns to close up small polluting enterprises, officials in charge of the project admit the bans have not lasted long.

"Today we close 100 small factories in Jiangsu (province), tomorrow there are 100 more to open," said Professor Li Ping from the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Intentionally or not, communist failures like the Soviet Union's mismanagement of the Aral Sea where a large inland body of water was steadily drained to provide irrigation for agriculture in the Central Asian Soviet republics were not on the official agenda.

Without directly pointing finger at China's habit of planning water diversions behind closed doors, many case studies presented in Beijing emphasised the need for a decision-making process open to public scrutiny as the only way to avoid calamitous mistakes and political fallouts.

One issue that appeared to dominate discussions was the evaluation of climate change in the formulation of long-term and expensive infrastructures.

Among others, Chinese scientists are worried that the current trend of global warming may accelerate arid north China's gradual transformation into a huge dust bowl and render current estimates of water consumption in the coming years unreliable.

"The North-South diversion project can represent one of the first examples for assessment of future environments in which infrastructures that are being planned today will operate," said Antonio Navarra, research director of the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology.

"Because of the project's vast size, long temporal scales and dependence on environmental condition, climate variations will have to be taken into account for the planning at a very initial stage," he added.