China on thin ice with Russians who fear plunder of precious lake
Residents of Siberian town protest at water-bottling factory aimed at feeding Beijing’s growing thirst
PENSIONER Mikhail Panchak has fished on Lake Baikal in freezing temperatures and biting winds, but this year he faces a new obstacle in the form of a black pipe stretching 1,500ft across the Siberian ice.
The pipe is the intake for a factory to bottle water from the world’s largest lake and sell it in China, where Baikal is well-known as a tourist destination.
But while the enterprise has promised to create jobs in the dusty Russian town of Kultuk, in the Irkutsk region, more than 800,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the state to stop the construction. A protest is planned for later this month.
Scientists warn that the Aquasib factory could harm the wetlands here and kick off a bottling boom that would deplete the largest single source of freshwater on the planet. The fact that the business is 99 per cent Chinese-owned is even more objectionable in a region that has suffered rampant logging to feed China’s construction boom.
“Locals aren’t even allowed to build a fence, but they are allowed to build this,” Mr Panchak said as he jigged for keta salmon in an ice hole near the construction crew’s cluster of cranes, tents and generators. “That means big money is involved, and it’s hard to fight big money.”
“Everything that’s connected with China ends badly,” said Zorikto Matanov, a member of the area’s indigenous Buryat people who created the online petition. “It’s a barbaric attitude toward nature’s riches. All the good stuff goes there, the forest and water and nephrite ( jade).”
In the wake of Western sanctions in 2014, Vladimir Putin began a pivot to China that culminated in him eating pancakes and drinking vodka with Xi Jinping in Vladivostok in September.
China overtook Germany as the Russian economy’s top foreign investor in 2017, its involvement reaching an estimated $35billion (£27billion) in 2018.
The growing ties have been driven largely by Russia’s natural resources, such as the gas that will be delivered to China through the joint Power of Siberia pipeline project.
But the friendship is an uneasy one, weighed down by a fraught history stretching back to the Sino-soviet split and the border war in 1969.
While the two countries held joint war games in the South China Sea in 2017, Russia’s Vostok exercises in the Far East last year seemed to be as much a warning to China as to the West.
As Russia’s top logging region, Irkutsk has already felt the fallout of China’s hunger for natural resources. Two thirds of Russia’s timber goes to China, but so much of it is cut illegally that the natural resources minister threatened in November to ban exports to the country if it did not help pay for forest restoration.
Now residents fear that Baikal will be similarly exploited, and the regional economy will have nothing to show for it. Aquasib’s general director, in fact, was previously arrested on charges of selling contraband timber to China.
“A few locals got work but China got a huge economic advantage,” said Vitaly Ryabtsev, a biologist who worked for much of his career at the nearby Baikal National Park. “We had a bad experience and people are scared it will be repeated with the water of Baikal.”
Aquasib is building its plant in the Talovskoye wetlands, a marshy area in the south-western corner of Baikal that looks unremarkable but is an important migration stopover for protected species including the whooper swan and black stork. The “marsh will lose all value for birds” as pipes are laid through it and human activity increases, Mr Ryabtsev said.
Following complaints, an investigation started by the governor found that Aquasib had failed to receive necessary permissions and had spilt petroleum and industrial waste at the factory site. Regional prosecutors said they would sue to stop construction.
The pipe would be finished this month, a worker at the site told The Daily Telegraph. Aquasib did not respond to requests for comment.
But the genie may have already been let out of the bottle.
COFCO Coca-cola, a Chinese joint venture with the international soft drink brand, said in August it planned to invest in producing water from Baikal, and other Chinese companies are reportedly interested as well.
Such a turn of events could be ruinous for Baikal, which previously saw low water levels and has recently been suffering from algae blooms linked to sewage dumping.
“Baikal is a strategic water reserve for the country,” Mr Ryabtsev said. “Locals will get salaries, but the water will go to China, and sooner or later there will be environmental damage.”
‘A bottling boom that would deplete the largest single source of freshwater on the planet’