Overuse of Water Leaves N. China Thirsty

China’s second-longest river is just 200 yards away. But peasants here are spending their time digging wells ever deeper to save their wheat from drought.

The Yellow River has slowed to a trickle in this village in northern China. Farther east, the river has dried up--60 miles short of where it’s supposed to empty into the Bohai Gulf.

China’s farmers have long struggled with seasonal drought. But now there is a far more serious problem for this nation still struggling to feed itself. Rapid industrialization, swelling cities and extensive irrigation are drying up water sources throughout northern China, an arid swath of eight provinces fringed by desert and fed by the Yellow River.

The scarcity means factories cannot run at full capacity, and ground-water levels are falling, causing land levels to sink and, near the coast, saltwater to seep into drinking water, water management officials say.

Ultimately, agriculture could be threatened--a persistent fear in land-poor, overpopulated China, where recurrent famine is etched in the collective memory.

“If the river was higher, we would use it to water the wheat. Now we’re using ground water,” said Li Minggui, a farmer and the local Communist Party secretary in Jiang Family Gully Village.

On his village’s fields, green blades 2 inches tall pierce the mustard-colored earth, the residue of floods in years past.

Well-water supplies are plentiful, but in recent years they have been digging deeper wells to be safe, Li said.

Jinan, the capital of eastern Shandong province just 15 miles south, has taken the opposite strategy.

Water management officials are taking water from the Yellow River to save the renowned springs that feed the lakes and canals lapping at the city’s picturesque parks and quaint teahouses.

“Jinan has abundant ground water, but the water level has fallen so low many pumps aren’t working,” said Li Shanrun, director of the Yellow River Management Bureau for Shandong.

Lives, crops and the city’s parks are not endangered yet, Li and other officials said. But the Jinan area’s thirst is emblematic of the chronic water shortage afflicting much of northern China.

Every day, China needs about 400 million gallons of water more than it can reasonably sustain, said Wang Guoxin of the Ministry of Water Resources.

About 300 Chinese cities have water shortages, Wang told a recent United Nations-sponsored conference in Beijing. Taking into account industry, agriculture and personal use, China consumes 633,500 gallons of water a year per person, about one-fourth the worldwide rate.

Two Chinese cities--Beijing and Shanghai--rank among the 10 cities worldwide with the most severe water problems, according to the U.N. Center for Human Settlements in Nairobi, Kenya.

Lack of water was especially severe this winter across northern China. The luckiest areas saw half the usual amount of rain and snow. Many places got only a tenth.

In Jiang Family Gully Village, the Yellow River is an anemic 15 yards wide. Its shallow water crawls past a wide bed of yellow sand left behind by the robust waterway created by summer rains.

The river’s condition is ironic. Historically it has been known for its devastating floods. In 1898, the river jumped its banks, changed course and submerged much of the Shandong plain sprawling eastward from Jinan.

Fifty years later, the Communist Party decided to put the river in the service of agriculture by building reservoirs and irrigation systems. The government’s success, coupled in recent years with a boom in industry, has helped drain the river.

Last year, the Yellow River ran dry for 122 days along the 180-mile stretch through Shandong to the Bohai Gulf. This year, the drying up started in February, a month earlier.

Chinese and U.N. experts believe China’s problem with water has more to do with managing than depleting resources.

“It’s not that the Yellow River has no water. It does have water, but it’s being taken out of the river,” said Li at the river management bureau in Shandong. “We have water. What we need to do is control and manage it.”

China plans to do this in part by building more and bigger reservoirs and diverting water from the Yangtze River northward, Li said. These projects will be costly, and the first of three diversion channels probably will not be finished until 2010.

Fixing China’s water woes may ultimately rely on a change in policy.

Determined to feed its growing population, China subsidizes irrigation and well-digging.

Agriculture uses up 80% to 90% of the water drawn from the Yellow River and thrives even along its upper reaches, where six times as much water is needed to grow a pound of grain as in more fertile Shandong.

“The unfortunate, hard truth of the matter is political feasibility,” said Steve McGurk, a water specialist with the Ford Foundation. “It’s unlikely water prices would be raised, and even if they were raised in principle, they would unlikely be collected.”