Asia Times: China


	May 11, 2002	atimes.com

China

Drought leaves Taiwan's leaders high and dry
By Laurence Eyton

TAIPEI - It isn't unusual to find the weather forecast on the front page of a newspaper. But as the lead story? Every day?

Taiwan has just enjoyed one of the mildest winters, and most pleasant springs in living memory. February and March are usually months of seemingly endless rain, when books go damp, clothes go moldy and nothing anywhere seems dry to the touch. Not this year however. Pleasantly cool weather and blue skies day after day have been a joy to Taiwanese, usually housebound by either the incessant rain of winter or the stifling heat and humidity of summer.

Unfortunately, there is a price to be paid. The rain-free weather has left Taiwan with its worst drought in a generation. The government is only beginning to put into action emergency measures to offset the island's severe water shortage - months too late say its critics, and in doing so is having to make some very hard choices indeed.

On Wednesday, the government announced that, with its key Shihmen dam down to only 5 percent of capacity, the capital Taipei would be affected by 24-hour periods of water rationing rotating between the city's 12 districts. In other northern counties, residents will get no water at all at weekends.

Meanwhile, industry in central Taiwan is suffering as water is conserved for the hugely thirsty Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park, home of Taiwan's semi-conductor industry. At the same time, the government is trying to keep farmers, who use the bulk of Taiwan's water, happy, given that they are already reeling under the blow of World Trade Organization entry in January this year and the resultant loss of protection.

But it remains to be seen whether the drought, once it is over, will prompt the serious rethink in Taiwan about water resource allocation that is needed.

The drought might be the worst in living memory, but water scarcity has dogging Taiwan, especially in the south, for a decade. Kaohsoiung and Tainan counties have had some form of water rationing in the summer months, one year out of three since the late 1980s. As long ago as 1996 the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) warned that water was not plentiful. "The island has been hit by drought several times this decade and suitable locations for dam and reservoir construction are all but exhausted. A future water shortage must be regarded as a very real possibility."

The EIU analysis added, "It says much for government foresight in this area that it is determined to push ahead a steel and petrochemical development in Tainan county which will consume 320,000 tons of water per day although nearby Tainan city (population 704,000) which gets through 600,000 tons per day is already drought-stricken one year in three."

Taiwan's drought is in part an accident of its geography. The island usually receives lots of rain, some 2,500 millimeters a year. Even this year, when rainfall has been about 30 percent of its usual level, precipitation is almost the same as in that byword for wet weather, England. The problem is that two thirds of Taiwan's land mass is steep mountainous. This is a land of small fast rivers which speedily take their water out to the sea. Countering the effects of this geography obviously involves the building of dams and reservoirs in the mountains, but this is, for political reasons, easier said than done.

To look at the complexity of the issue, take the dam that is not going to be built, according to President Chen Shui-bian, near the village of Meinung in southern Taiwan. The dam has been in the planning stage since 1990 and has been bitterly opposed by environmentalists since 1992. In 1999, a NT$250 million (US$7.2 million) budget was passed for the first sage construction of the dam, but a year later this was shelved by the incoming Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government for the length of that government.

What was the Meinung dam for? Ostensibly to relieve Taiwan's second city, Kaohsiung, of regular water shortages. I say ostensibly because this justification has never been widely believed in Taiwan, where the government's desire to put more industrial development in the south of the island has always been understood to be the real reason for the project.

Bringing greater development to the south, with the greater wealth that would ensue might not be as controversial were it not for the fact that the KMT government during its half-century in power, along with its private sector cronies, raped the island with its industrial development, producing what is widely believed to be the most degraded environment in East Asia.

One of the problems is the KMT's addiction to smokestack industries such as steel and cement-making and petroleum refining. These are the businesses the party's money is invested in and which are dominated by its business cronies. Whether they are suitable for Taiwan has never been a great concern. The most recent plan before the government change was to take the island's last surviving area of wetlands, an area internationally renowned among bird-watchers, and build a naphtha cracker and steel mill on the sight.

This kind of monstrous insensitivity is the kind of thing that has given Taiwan's environmental movement teeth. Environmentalists are not seen as cranks, but as responsible - and respected - people trying to preserve something livable amid the wasteland that 50 years of reckless development have made of an island once renowned for its natural beauty.

The anti-dam activists had more specific arguments against Meinung, among which were that the rivers which were supposed to feed the dam did not have the volumes the government said they did, so the dam's utility would thereby be diminished, and - an argument that carried much more force after the September 21 earthquake that devastated central Taiwan leaving more than 2,000 dead - the dam was cited in an area of seismic activity which would jeopardize its foundations.

When the new government took office in May 2000 it quickly announced that the Meinung dam would not be built. It also said that plans would be put into effect to give Kaohsiung more drinking water. There was no mention of water for industry.

The Meinung dam case is illustrative of the problems in Taiwan as a whole, the tension between a wide desire to see more development and an equally wide inability to find the tradeoffs that make this acceptable.

For example, there is a wide consensus that the kind of smokestack development the old government wanted is not desirable for Taiwan. But there agreement ends. The public wants what it sees as clean industry, basically an expansion of Taiwan's high-tech sector to the south of the island. The problem with this is that it puts more pressure, not less, on water resources.

As one newspaper editorialized at the time, "The south has to develop. Development, even - in fact, especially - of the high-tech variety needs water. The south is short of water. So if the Meinung dam is not to be built, where is this water to come from?"

No answer has yet been given. To put the magnitude of the problem in perspective, the Tainan Science-based industrial park, the sister development to Hsinchu, which concentrates on chipmaking, will, when development is complete, require 200,000 tons of water a day. The Meinung dam was also supposed to supply this. The Water Resources Bureau, long before the current drought, said that it could only provide 62,000 tons a day.

Exacerbating the problem is that the southern Taiwan plain, where the industrial park is to be located, is also the rice basket of Taiwan. And this rice is grown using irrigation water over a network of 13,000 kilometers of channels for the water in which the industrial park is in direct competition.

Given that Taiwan's rice is not competitive on international markets, economic sense might dictate that the water go to industry while Taiwan imports cheaper rice from abroad.

But economic common sense conflicts with more emotional arguments. The pre-industrial simple life of the farmer has in modern Taiwan been idealized to an enormous extent, as a nostalgia-laced metaphor for what modern Taiwan has lost in the development process. Most Taiwanese are, at the most, two generations away from the land.

As a result, farmers occupy a social position not unlike their French counterparts, able to claim a special cultural status for their uneconomic way of life and able to mobilize huge public sympathy over any perceived threat to that way of life. As to what, in such circumstances, a government is supposed to do, the current one certainly has no answer.

Environmentalists are not without their arguments, of course. One of them is to point out just how much water is wasted in Taiwan. The Water Resources Bureau itself estimated that some 20 percent of all piped water is lost through leakage. In Germany the total is just 2 percent. The problem is simply one of money. The government prefers to spend its stretched budgetary resources on more visible public benefits than well-maintained water delivery systems.

Water recycling is also an option, say the environmentalists, pointing out that only 27 percent of industrial water is recycled, compared to 76 percent in Japan.

Then there is the sheer profligacy of Taiwanese in water use. Perhaps it is part of living on an island with so much rain. Since it rains so much there is little basic understanding of how little of this rain water, only about 18 percent of about 90 billion tonnes annually, is available for use - of which three quarters goes to the agricultural sector. Why should Taiwanese use twice as much water per capita as the Dutch?

Such practices as better pipeline maintenance, more industrial recycling and less profligate domestic water use - which outstrips industrial use by 50 percent - certainly would do something to alleviate Taiwan of its increasingly frequent water shortages.

But Water Resources Bureau officials remain convinced that these are only stopgap measures. Taiwan can sacrifice its industrial development or its farmers, or it can build more dams.

The Meinung dam will get built, they say. By 2011 there will simply be no choice. Unfortunately, the project will, of course, be 10 years late and the dearth it was meant to alleviate will be far more serious.

The problem is, as in so many other areas in Taiwan at the moment, that there is simply a lack of courage at the political level to open a debate about what must be done. Any of the three options have highly vociferous opponents and the government just does not want to open what will be a heated debate and, if truth were told, does not want to come up with a policy.

Much of this has to do with the government's experience of canceling construction of Taiwan's fourth nuclear power plant two years ago.

Probably inspired by the relative lack of outcry over the suspension of the Meinung dam project, canceling the power plant was a doctrinaire move by a government without legislative muscle, the government assumed that the environmental lobby would be able to shout down its business counterpart in the battle for public opinion. This it was unable to do. Ê

The result was a debacle for the government, utter humiliation, the overturning of its policy by a hostile legislature and a reprimand for behavior verging on the unconstitutional from the Council of Grand Justices. The lesson here was that issues of environment versus business were simply too unpredictable for a government this weak - it lacks a majority of seats in the legislature - to want to deal with.

None of this will relieve the current drought, only rain can do that. The point is that drought or not, water in Taiwan is an ever scarcer resource which, if action is not taken, is going to be a serious break on the island's further industrial development. The current drought provides an excellent opportunity to start public debate about how this scarcity of resources might be remedied. Unfortunately, the government is unlikely to take this opportunity. Ê

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