World’s largest water diversion plan won’t slake China’s thirst
AUTUMN rains came too late to save the stunted stalks of Shu Xinguo’s corn crop, withered by a dry July growing season.
“We rely on the weather for our living,” said Shu, weary and resigned, his tanned hands hoisting bundles of his remaining crop – green and yellow tobacco leaves – onto a three-wheeled tractor. “There’s no water for irrigation, and the well in the village has no water either.”
Thirty- seven miles ( 60 kilometres) away, China’s largest aqueduct transports as much as 18.3 million cubic meters of fresh water a day through Shu’s province to quench the growing thirst of Beijing in the north. None of it comes to Shu’s village or any of thousands of farms in the region.
It’s China’s age- old dilemma: A tug of war between the farms that help feed the nation, and the soaring demands of industry and city- dwellers in the parched northern plains.
With an excess of rain in the south and not enough in the north, China’s solution is as simple as it was expensive: Build three massive aqueducts to divert the water for an estimated cost of more than 500 billion yuan ( RM319 billion).
The result is the world’s most ambitious water transfer programme, the South-toN-orth Water Diversion project. Its middle channel – from the Danjiangkou reservoir to Beijing and Tianjin – was fi nished in 2014. Proposed in the time of Chairman Mao Zedong, it is a stunning engineering feat. Some 11 billion cubic metres of water has traversed the 1,432-km-long waterway, supplying factories, businesses and 53 million residents. It isn’t enough. “As the country’s economy develops, industries are using more water,” said Huanguang Qiu, a professor with the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University.
“And the competition will become even more fierce.”
Beijing, which gets about 70 per cent of its water from the South-North diversion project, is expected to add another two million people before the government caps the city’s population at 23 million.
President Xi Jinping announced plans in April to build a new city, Xiongan, about 100 kilometres southwest of the capital. With an estimated 5.4 million people, it would also be fed by the aqueduct.
Even when the waterway reaches maximum capacity in 2019, China’s demand is growing so quickly that other solutions will be needed. Rivers and aquifers poisoned by years of poor control over fertiliser use and factory effluent need to be cleaned up, waste reined in and offenders punished.
The result is a revolution in the ways China uses, monitors and allots its most precious resource.
Farms are changing crops and embracing technology to conserve irrigation, industries are being forced to clean up effluent, citizens are taking to social media to report offenders
We rely on the weather for our living... There’s no water for irrigation, and the well in the village has no water either. Shu Xinguo, farmer
and the government is adapting a long-held food security policy to rely more on imports of waterhungry crops.
Part of the problem is that China doesn’t just need to fi nd enough water to supply its rising demand, it also needs to replenish aquifers that have been depleted for years.
“Industries and cities had been drawing down underground water as deep as possible, which took away water from farming,” said Yu Hequn, directorgeneral, Construction and Administration Bureau of the South-to-North Water Diversion Central Route Project.
“Now we are returning water to agriculture and the ecosystem.”
By 2015, 230,000 square kilometres were being affected by over- extraction of groundwater, mostly in the north, leading to land subsidence, sea water intrusion and other problems, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said.
The depletion is worst in northern provinces like Hebei, which surrounds Beijing, and neighbouring Henan. At least seven giant sinkholes have been reported in Hebei, where farmers have drilled ever- deeper boreholes.
The government has promised to divert billions of cubic metres of water from the Yellow River to farms to ease the shortage. Even so, Hebei could still face a water shortage of one billion cubic metres by 2030, Zhang Tielong, deputy head of the provincial water resources department, said when the South-North waterway opened in late 2014.
One way to stem the reduction in groundwater is taxes. Last month, the government expanded a water resource tax trial to cover nine municipalities and provinces, with duties ramping up if quotas are exceeded. Regular water tax rates were highest in Beijing and Tianjin, according to China’s fi nance ministry, and water from underground will be taxed at twice the rate or more than for surface water. — WP-Bloomberg