Climate Change Contributes to Drying Up of Lake in China

A plant is seen on the cracked bed of the dried area of Xieshan, which is part of Poyang lake in east China's Jiangxi province. Photograph: China Daily/Reuters

For visitors expecting to see China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang is a desolate spectacle. Under normal circumstances it covers 3,500 sq km, but last month only 200 sq km were underwater. A dried-out plain stretches as far as the eye can see, leaving a pagoda perched on top of a hillock that is usually a little island. Wrapped in the mist characteristic of the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, the barges are moored close to the quayside beside a pitiful trickle of water. There is no work for the fisheries.

According to the state news agency Xinhua, the drought – the worst for 60 years – is due to the lack of rainfall in the area round Poyang and its tributaries. Poor weather conditions this year are partly responsible. But putting the blame on them overlooks the role played by the colossal Three Gorges reservoir, 500km upstream. The cause and effect is still not officially recognised, even if the government did admit last May that the planet's biggest dam had given rise to "problems that need to be solved very urgently".

"Every year, when the Three Gorges reservoir stores water – to power the dam's turbines during the winter – the flow rate in the Yangtze drops. This in turn increases the rate at which the level of Poyang lake falls, and the period of low water comes sooner," said Ye Xuchun, a researcher at China's Southwest University. In partnership with scientists at the Lake Science and Environment laboratory at Nanking University, he has published a comparative analysis of water levels in the Three Gorges basin and at the lake's northern extremity, near the city of Hukou, where the outflow from Poyang joins the Yangtze.

The authors conclude that the artificial regulation of the reservoir, which must be kept full to optimise electricity output, reduces the water level in the lower reaches of the Yangtze. This means that the big river no longer "plugs" the lake's northern outlet, so the other rivers feeding into Poyang simply pass through the dwindling lake and run on downstream. This was the case in 2006, a very dry year that coincided with the period when the Three Gorges reservoir was filling up. "When the depth of the reservoir was increased by 15 metres, to reach 155 metres in October, the lake dropped very low at Hukou," the scientists said.

The beginning of 2012 has proved even worse. The region's environmental balance was "seriously affected", said Dai Nianhua, deputy head of the Lake Poyang Research Centre in Nanchang, the provincial capital. When the water level is too low there are no fish, so there is no food for the migrating birds that usually break their journey at Poyang. The government has decided to drop fish and shellfish into the lake from helicopters.

The economic impact is just as disastrous. "Freighters can only cross the lake empty," said a worker at the shipyard in Xingzi, whereas usually the lake is a hive of activity in rural Jiangxi province. Some people are now suggesting that a dam should be built where the lake joins the Yangtze, but no one knows what side-effects that might have.

As for the fisheries, they have upturned their boats on the shore or abandoned them on the dried-out bed of Poyang. Guo Jintao, a resident of Yumincun, a village with about 100 fishers, has not been out on the water for over a year. He started fishing when he was 13 and in 50 years he has not seen the lake this dry. He and his wife have switched to casual labouring in the building trade.

"Next year we'll see. If there's enough water, we'll go fishing again, otherwise we'll carry on with our new work," Guo said. His wife, Zhang Jingzen, 55, finds stacking bricks hard work. "I prefer fishing. Our family's been fishing for four generations," she said.

The family used to earn $1,600 to $3,200 a year, but last year's earnings only amounted to $800. The local authorities offered them around $600 in compensation. Another fisherman, intrigued by the conversation, butted in to say that he only got $80 from the municipal council, whereas the province had allocated $160 for each member of the fishing community.

"The incomes in fishing villages are dropping as fast as the water in the lake. Some residents will have move on to other trades," said Xu Bin, the author of a thesis on the socio-economic consequences of the lake's environmental disorders. He warns: "The soil of China is dry, so the Yangtze is vital. Poyang is one of the key elements and its current predicament is a warning for the future."

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

Drought Hits 10 Million People in China

A Chinese farmer on dry farmland on the outskirts of Rizhao, Shandong Province, in January. Photo courtesy: nytimes

The United Nations’ food agency issued an alert on Tuesday warning that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.

China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached.

“China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, in the Philippines.

The state-run news media in China warned Monday that the country’s major agricultural regions were facing their worst drought in 60 years. On Tuesday the state news agency Xinhua said that Shandong Province, a cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was bracing for its worst drought in 200 years unless substantial precipitation came by the end of this month.

The World's Largest Crops. Photo courtesy: nytimes

World wheat prices are already surging, and they have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. A separate United Nations report last week said global food export prices had reached record levels in January. The impact of China’s drought on global food prices and supplies could create serious problems for less affluent countries that rely on imported food.

With $2.85 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, nearly three times that of Japan, the country with the second-largest reserves, China has ample buying power to prevent any serious food shortages.

“They can buy whatever they need to buy, and they can outbid anyone,” Mr. Zeigler said. China’s self-sufficiency in grain prevented world food prices from moving even higher when they spiked three years ago, he said.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said Tuesday that 12.75 million acres of China’s 35 million acres of wheat fields had been affected by the drought. It said that 2.57 million people and 2.79 million head of livestock faced shortages of drinking water.

Chinese state news media are describing the drought in increasingly dire terms. “Minimal rainfall or snow this winter has crippled China’s major agricultural regions, leaving many of them parched,” Xinhua reported. “Crop production has fallen sharply, as the worst drought in six decades shows no sign of letting up.”

Xinhua said that Shandong Province, in the heart of the Chinese wheat belt, had received only 1.2 centimeters, or about half an inch, of rain since September. The report did not provide a comparison for normal rainfall for the period.

The Food and Agriculture Organization, in its “special alert” on Tuesday, said the drought’s effects had been somewhat tempered by relatively few days of subzero temperatures and government irrigation projects. The agency went on to caution that extreme cold, with temperatures of minus 18 degrees Celsius (just below zero Fahrenheit), could have “devastating” effects.

Kisan Gunjal, the F.A.O. food emergency officer in Rome who handles Asia alerts, said by telephone that if rain came soon and temperatures warmed up, then the wheat crop could still be saved and a bumper crop might even be possible.

On Tuesday, Chinese meteorological agencies were warning of frost for the next nine nights in the heart of Shandong Province, with temperatures falling as low as 21 degrees Fahrenheit. They forecast little chance of precipitation in the next 10 days except for the possibility of a light rain or a dusting of snow on Wednesday or Thursday.

Mr. Gunjal said the special alert on China was the first that the F.A.O. had issued anywhere in the world this year. There was only one last year, expressing “grave concern” about food supplies in the Sahel region of Africa, notably Niger.

President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, China’s top two officials, made separate visits to drought-stricken areas last week, and each called for “all-out efforts” to cope with the water shortage.

Typically, world food reports barely mention China, partly because many details of the country’s agriculture production and reserves are state secrets. But China, in fact, is enormously important to the world’s food supply, especially if something goes wrong.

Farmers drew water to irrigate their arid wheat fields in China’s Shandong province on Tuesday. Photo courtesy: nytimes

The heat wave in Russia last summer, combined with floods in Australia in recent months, has drawn worldwide attention to the international wheat market, because Russia and Australia have historically been big exporters. But China’s wheat industry has existed in almost total isolation from the rest of the world, with virtually no exports or imports, until last year, when modest imports began. Yet it is enormous, accounting for one-sixth of global wheat output. The statistical database of the United Nations’ food agency shows that in 2009, the last year available, China produced almost twice as much wheat as the United States or Russia and more than five times as much as Australia.

Currently, the ground in the country is so dry from Beijing south through the provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shandong to Jiangsu Province, just north of Shanghai, that trees and houses are coated with topsoil that has blown off parched fields.

China’s national obsession with self-sufficiency in food includes corn, another crop that is grown and consumed entirely in China with minimal imports or exports. Little known outside of China, the country’s corn industry actually grows one-fifth of the world’s corn, according to F.A.O. statistics. China’s corn crop is mostly in the country’s northern provinces, where the drought is worst now.

Mr. Gunjal said the success or failure of the corn crop, as well as the rice crop, would depend mostly on rainfall this spring and summer, not the shortage of rain this winter.

Winters tend to be dry in southern China, the world’s largest rice-producing region. But this winter is drier than most.

China had about 55 million tons of wheat in stockpiles as of last summer, Mr. Gunjal said. That was equal to about half the annual harvest.

China is already the world’s largest importer of soybeans, which are oilseeds, not a grain. China buys soybeans mainly for use as animal feed, because the Chinese diet is shifting toward more meat.

Via nytimes