Society

Guizhou strives to survive as drought worsens

By Liang Chao (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-04-02 17:09

PANXIAN, Guizhou – Facing the worst drought in 80 to 100 years, residents in Southwest China's Guizhou are striving for survival through the prolonged water shortage, which has threatened their livelihood worse than ever before.

Zhang Qipin, 17, and his mother wait in line for hours each day along with hundreds of others in Yinggongshan, a village of 3,500 in Banqiao Town, Pan County, to fetch drinking water from three fire vehicles.

It has become a daily routine for him since early February, when no water could be had from their nearby water sources, including that stored at his water cellars at home.

Each day, his family can fetch four to six buckets of water, about 15 kg per person. "Except my family’s drinking, there is not enough to feed four buffalos we kept for farming," he said. "Each needs one bucket of water per day."

"To save water, my family have sold three buffalos at a low price with only one left for farming in the spring plowing around mid-May," he said, carrying two buckets of water on his shoulders with a pole, in a hurry to have them stored at his water cellar in the hope of turning back again for two more buckets of water, the extra ration they were offered on Monday.

Worse than his plight, Zhang Xiaopan, 48, sold one buffalo and one pig, all the livestock he had, to deal with the ration of water.

Without the buffalo, the most important means of farming on hillsides of high altitude, it will be difficult for him to cultivate his hillside land by mid-May, if rains by then.

"I have to work outside to earn money and buy back my buffalo for planting corn before sowing season," he said. "If possible, I hope I can earn enough to build a water cellar for my family."

His family is among those who have not built a water cellar at home. In the mountain village with an elevation of over 1,700 meters, they used to take water from a stream by walking 3 km over three hours a day in a normal year.

Unfortunately, the stream dried up completely this year because of the drought.

It would cost 5,000 yuan ($796) for a rural family of three to four to build a cellar holding 20 cubic meters of water for drinking until the next rainy season, local officials said.

A rural household needs to raise two-thirds of the money with the rest hopefully to be subsidized by local authorities this year due to the drought, they say. However, locals said the cost could be much higher than that.

In the county’s Xiaobaiyan, a village of 1,020 people, the majority of farmers engaged in husbandry have already bartered away their stock to get over the difficulties, particularly the lack of drinking water from the drought, according to the latest report, which was released by local authorities to highlight the problem.

In Panxian, a county with an average altitude of 1,700 meters, up to 656,900 residents, or over 55 percent of the total, have been short of drinking water since the beginning of the drought, said Wang Gang, the county magistrate.

Of the affected, only 160,000 have access to the drinking water sent by authorities through vehicles; the rest, mostly mountainous farmers, have to settle the matter themselves by carrying water home on shoulders with a pole or using carts, he said.

"What I worried most is that, as the drought is prolonged, fetching water has become a heavy burden for them, which would leave them no more time for farming or working outside to recoup the losses they had from the drought, not to mention the increasing cost of taking water every day," he said.

In a few worst-hit mountainous villages without roads for vehicles to carry water, farmers had to pay for water, local water officials disclosed.

Life seems to be a bit easier for those living in Xueguantun, a village with part of its rice paddy downstream from the Neisudu, a local river where water was dammed upstream as a small reservoir and often sluiced downstream for villagers’ drinking and farming.

Hundreds of farmers are busy planting fast-growing vegetables such as peppers and cabbage with the water from the reservoir to recoup the harvest they lost on their hillside land. "The vegetables we are planting can be harvested in about 60 days from now and sold on the market for money," Guo Jingzhi, head of the village, said, taking care of operating pumps set along a narrow ditch linked with paddy fields.

"We offered 24 new pumps for the villagers to plant cash crops with all the diesel oil they need for the pumping also subsidized," said Xu Dazhong, an official from Panxian’s flood-control and drought relief office.

"With the help of water, we are trying our best to save ourselves and mitigate further damage to be caused by the drought instead of merely waiting for relief from government," the village leader said.

"Of course, income from growing the vegetable is not enough for us to lead a better life as we used to because of the persistent drought, but it’s better than nothing."

Around Xiaolongtan, some 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of land is used to grow wheat, and a small water project is built in a village of Zhuchangping Town, 37 km southwest of Xingyi, a county-level city in Guizhou.

"Although the wheat growing in the farmland only accounts for about 10 percent of the total my village had sowed last year, a normal yield of the wheat can be expected soon on this part of land thanks to the water," said Xiang Luchan, the Party secretary of Xiaolongtan Village.

The project was built in the late 1950s and looked quite shabby like a hilly pond rather than a reservoir.

But Xiang’s village and its 1,800 villagers did not suffer the water shortage for drinking and irrigation this year while many others were experiencing the worst drought in Guizhou.

The water project was built by collecting water from three mouths of a spring where water continues to spring out throughout the year even during the drought, according to Li Zhuping, head of the town. "Without water from the spring, people of the village and thousands of others living nearby would be short of drinking water and have nothing to harvest this year, like many others the drought had affected in Xingyi," said Liu Guangxue, director of the Water Bureau of Qianxinan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, the worst-hit area of the drought in Guizhou.

He said the prefecture authorities hope that the project can be renovated through expansion as a medium-sized key water project of Xingyi for supplying water to 33,700 locals and their 41,000 mu hectares of farmland downstream.

The prefecture has submitted their proposal for the project to authorities for approval along with 15 others like it in the hope of getting financial support for enough water conservancy infrastructures to bring its agriculture into irrigation effectively in the future.

Most of the local water projects built in the prefecture have been out of repair and become too weak to store water effectively for use under the local karst land formation, experts say. Guizhou is known as a province where sunny days hardly last for three days because of frequent rains. However, it is not easy for locals to benefit from its relatively rich annual precipitation due to its karst land feature, which makes it difficult to have rainfalls stored for use.

That’s why Guizhou is also known as a land with no three feet of flat land where people, particularly farmers, are too poor to earn their living from the infertile farmland and hardly to have three penny coins inside their wallets, as the Chinese saying goes.

The plight has worsened for millions of people since last July, when the drought hit Guizhou, dried up its 12,145 reservoirs and hilly ponds, with 97 percent of its counties and over 10 million people badly affected.

Even since, more than 5.8 million rural residents and 4.4 million livestock were short of drinking water, crops and cash plants were scorched with lost plants seen everywhere. The drought made water in its more than 12,000 reservoirs and hilly ponds, or about 70 percent of the total, fall off their dead water level. And over 1,780 dried up completely.

Under these catastrophic conditions, water has become Guizhou’s sorrow for millions of locals who had to barter their buffalos, the only means of hard farming on the hillside land of high altitude in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.