Water: too little, too polluted

Water: too little, too polluted

"China has to work hard to deal with its insufficiency of water resources, worsening water pollution and threats of floods and drought." Thus said Wen Jiabao, vice premier of China. China's limited water resources are located predominantly in its southern parts and do not serve a large part of the overall population. In southern China, 34 per cent of the Chinese population has access to 81 per cent of the total water resources. The 34 per cent who live in the north rely on merely 7.5 per cent of the country's water supply. Frequent natural disasters, like the floods of 1998, show that the problem isn't limited to paucity of water but its distribution and management as well.

Human-induced threats to the country's water supply, such as the rapid and unregulated growth of industrial activities, also pose grave problems. Urban growth is happening without adequate water supply infrastructure. With economic reform and decentralisation, the large state-owned enterprises have been giving way to smaller, rural township-and-village enterprises ( tve s). These enterprises, established from local collectives or individual farmers, are largely unregulated, especially with regard to environmental pollution. The growth of tve s parallels the increase in the production of industrial wastewater. Between 1981 and 1995, wastewater volumes increased at an annual rate of 1.65 per cent. Of the total wastewater discharged in 1995, 21 per cent came from tve s (see box: Small blunders ). Three industries contribute most to this: pulp and paper, chemicals, and textile dyeing. A 1989-1991 study showed that the wastewater contained organic matter, acid, alkali, nitrogen, phosphate, phenols, cyanide, lead, cadmium, mercury and bichromate. Mercury concentrations were 45-700 per cent over the national standard, and lead was 3,600-5,216 per cent above the standard. "Water pollution, a major focal point of recent Chinese policy, has contaminated 52 of 135 monitored urban river sections. Such river sections do not even meet the lowest standards necessary for irrigation water, rendering them mere waste sinks. Access to future safe drinking water supplies is threatened for tens of millions of people," says the World Bank report. 12jav.net12jav.net