A Water crisis looming for China, officials warn

By Jehangir Pocha, Globe Correspondent, 1/2/2004

 

BEIJING -- Surging water consumption in China's growing cities and towns, coupled with reckless industrial and agricultural use, is straining the nation's already strapped water supplies, the government and several international organizations warn.
 
China's water resources amount to the fifth-largest in the world, and its winding rivers have cradled civilizations for over five millennia. But with the country's population swelling to 1.3 billion, many of China's rivers, including the legendary Yellow River, are drying up, and the water table is falling.
 

The international groups say dwindling water supplies could disrupt China's food security, public health, environment, and economic growth.
 

"China's problem is `brown' poverty. If you look at a map, large swaths of the country are totally brown -- nothing can grow there," said Deepak Bhattasali, the World Bank's chief economist in Beijing. "If this brown spreads, so will hunger, [and] industrial growth will slow."
 

The country's annual per capita water supply is only 2,200 cubic meters, 25 percent of the global average, according to the World Bank. The government says that by 2030, the water supply is expected to fall below 1,700 cubic meters per person, which the World Bank calls dangerously low.
 

During the same period, water demand is expected to more than triple, from 120 billion tons a year to 400 billion tons. Using uncharacteristically strong language, the World Bank recently warned that the situation "will soon become unmanageable, with catastrophic consequences for future generations."
 

Although such provinces as Gansu and Shaanxi have always been parched, other areas are now facing shortages.
 

Picturesque Hubei Province, home to Beijing, is known as the "Province of a Thousand Lakes." But industrialization has turned more than three-fourths of its once pristine lakes into sandpits.
 

Beneath the rugged expanse of the North China Plain, where almost half of the country's grain is produced, a recent government survey revealed that the water table has fallen 5 feet in just five years.
 

The government estimates that 400 of China's 668 cities are dealing with water shortages. The World Bank also says three-fourths of China's rivers are polluted, and more than 700 million people drink contaminated water.
 

Beijing responded this year by finalizing a massive project that will transfer 50 billion cubic meters of water each year from the Yangtze River in the south to the Yellow, Huai, and Hai rivers in the north.
 

The project, under consideration since Mao Zedong conceived of it in the 1950s, entails plowing three channels about 800 miles long between China's flood-prone south and the arid north. It would join China's Three Gorges dam and the Qinghai-Tibet railway as one of the world's largest, and most controversial, public works projects.
 

Environmentalists counter that the $25 billion project, scheduled for completion in 2009, will damage delicate ecosystems and force more than 250,000 people to relocate. Some fear it will cause the Yangtze itself to run dry.
 

Even the official State Environmental Protection Agency has warned the government that "most countries no longer undertake large-scale, cross-watershed transfer projects because they are very expensive and have severe environmental consequences."
 

While the World Bank says that the project could address some environmental issues, and in some places might actually mitigate river pollution, it warns that it could prove futile unless China fundamentally changes the way it consumes and manages water.

China does not act like a nation in the midst of a water shortage. Taps run freely because the government subsidizes water supplies, especially to farmers. For industry, China's water consumption efficiency is one-tenth that of developed countries. And only a fraction of China's industrially used water is recycled, mostly because local governments are loath to burden local firms with costly recycling rules.

The vice minister of water resources, Zhai Haohui, has said China loses more than 30 billion cubic meters of water every year, causing a $28 billion loss in industrial output.

But Zhai, seen as a reformer within the government, says he is committed to making the tough decisions needed to correct the situation.
 

Water conservation and recycling programs are being introduced, and the government has said it will raise the price of water supplied to farmers and industry. Steps are being taken to curb rapid deforestation and soil erosion across the country. Hydropower, which creates large evaporating reservoirs, is increasingly being complemented with wind power.

Meng Xian Gan, director of the China Solar Energy Institute, a Beijing think tank, said China is on track to generate 10 percent of its power from wind and solar energy by 2010. Programs to desalinate seawater using solar energy are also in place in several cities.
 

But none of this is likely to be enough, analysts say.

Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental watchdog based in Washington, D.C., warns that China's water problems will have global repercussions.

Brown calculates that shortages will cut China's annual agricultural output by 9 million tons, forcing it to buy grain. This will push up world food prices, something Brown describes as "life-threatening for the world's 1.3 billion poor who live on less than $1 a day."

Western diplomatic officials in Beijing say they are also troubled by China's damming of the Mekong River and its diversion of water from Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Some officials also are concerned that China could divert rivers that originate in Tibet, such as the Indus and Sutlej, which are also critical to India and Pakistan, and the Brahmaputra, which is critical to India and Burma.
 

The possibility of water disputes between China and its neighbors is a serious enough concern that the US National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officials, has begun to closely monitor China's water situation.

"In China, water could end up being more important than oil," Meng said.