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3 Beijing dips its toes in troubled
waters By Pallavi Aiyar
BEIJING - For millennia, China's great
rivers have snaked their long, meandering courses
across the country, providing the life-blood for
Chinese civilization: water. Along the banks of
the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze to
the south, 5,000 years of history and culture have
unfolded, with agriculture flourishing in an
otherwise inhospitable terrain and trade bringing
prosperity and dynamism in its wake.
But
the effects of severe pollution, large-scale
damming and
climate change are combining
to spell catastrophe for the rivers, with deeply
worrying implications for the millions of Chinese
who continue to depend on them.
Ten
percent of the Yellow River today is sewage,
little surprise when, according to the government,
the volume of wastewater flowing into the river
increased from about 2 billion tonnes in the 1980s
to 4.3 billion tonnes by 2005. Experts say that
since the 1950s the volume of water in the Yellow
River has decreased by 75%, so that the
once-mighty river has been reduced to a more or
less seasonal body of water that usually dries up
800 kilometers before reaching the sea.
The diagnosis for the Yangtze is equally
bleak. This year, the first annual health report
for the river revealed 30% of its major
tributaries to be heavily polluted with high
levels of ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorus. In
2006 alone, more than 26 billion tonnes of
wastewater was pumped into the Yangtze, a river
that flows through 11 provinces and
municipalities. One-tenth of the main stream of
the river is estimated to be in "critical
condition".
The report, the combined
output of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the
Ministry of Water Resources and the World Wide
Fund for Nature, also found that the annual
harvest of fish in the river fell from about
500,000 tonnes per year in the 1950s to 100,000
tonnes in the 1990s.
And despite growing
awareness of the looming water crisis, the deputy
director of China's State Environmental Protection
Administration (SEPA), Pan Yue, called 2006 "the
grimmest year yet for China's environmental
situation", with a total of 130 chemical spills
occurring during the year, or one spill every
three days.
The grim statistics do not end
here. According to SEPA, 70% of China's rivers and
lakes are polluted to some degree and 28% are too
polluted even for irrigation or industrial use.
Moreover, 90% of the water under cities is also
too polluted to drink. As a result, several
hundred million Chinese lack access to safe water.
Pollution aggravates China's natural water
scarcity, particularly in the drought-prone north.
Already, the country's annual per capita water
supply is only 2,200 cubic meters, just 25% of the
global average, according to the World Bank.
Factoring in a combination of trends including
rapid urbanization, continuing industrialization
and climate change, it is quite likely that water
rather than oil will be at the center of China's
coming resource crisis.
Water is the most
ubiquitously needed resource, Professor Liu
Changming, director of the United Research Center
for Water Problems (URCWP), points out. "It is
needed for industry, for agriculture and by every
living being. We face an energy crisis but we can
work on alternative and renewable energy
resources. When it comes to the water crisis,
there is no alternative for water," he said.
Indeed, water in China, as elsewhere, is a
multi-faceted issue with a direct and far-reaching
impact on health, economic development, food
security, political stability, bio-diversity and
even international relations.
One of the
major sources of water pollution is untreated
industrial waste that is intentionally or
accidentally discharged into rivers. Some 21,000
chemical companies line the Yangtze and Yellow
rivers. Along with paper, steel, textile and power
plants, these chemical-manufacturing units are
often in blatant violation of environmental norms
for discharges and wastewater treatment.
The Institute of Public and Environmental
Affairs (IPEA), a non-governmental organization
(NGO) run by Ma Jun, author of the influential
book China's Water Crisis, maintains a
website that keeps track of all the companies
known to have violated pollution laws. Currently
5,500 companies are listed, including 80
multinationals.
The crux of the problem
underlying the lax enforcement of pollution norms
is that for the current generation of local
officials, economic growth defined solely in terms
of gross domestic product (GDP) is the paramount
goal. Promotions are usually directly linked to
the amount of investment attracted. As a result,
implementing environmental laws is often seen as
detrimental to the local economy as well as the
career prospects of individual officials.
Collusion between polluters and local
officials is also commonplace. Thus even companies
equipped with wastewater-treatment systems rarely
use them, given the expense of the power it takes
to run the machines. Officials in charge of
enforcement are paid off to turn a blind eye. That
a large number of offending companies are
state-owned complicates the issue even further.
One of China's worst ever pollution spills
into its waterways occurred in November 2005 when
a blast at a petrochemical plant in Jilin province
led to 100 tonnes of the carcinogenic chemicals
benzene and nitrobenzene being discharged into the
Songhua River.
The plant was owned and
managed by PetroChina, the country's largest
state-owned energy company. After the blast, the 4
million inhabitants of Harbin city in northeastern
China's Heilongjiang province had their water
supply cut off for five days.
The spill
was kept secret for more than a week. During this
time, as the 80-kilometer slick made its way
toward Harbin, tens of thousands continued to use
the river for drinking and washing. The
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