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Ensuring water for China's millions

Pallavi Aiyar

Pollution is aggravating the scarcity, particularly in the drought-prone north.

FOR MILLENNIA, China's great rivers have snaked their long meandering courses across the country, providing the lifeblood for civilisation: water. Along the banks of the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze to the south, 5,000 years of history and culture have unfolded with agriculture flourishing in otherwise inhospitable terrain and trade bringing prosperity and dynamism in its wake.

But the effects of chronic pollution, large-scale damming, and climate change are combining to spell a catastrophe for the rivers with deeply worrying implications for the millions who continue to depend on them.

Ten per cent of the Yellow River today is sewage. Hardly surprising when, according to the government, the volume of waste water flowing into the river increased from about 2 billion tonnes in the 1980s to 4.3 billion tonnes by 2005. Experts say that since the 1950s the volume of water in the Yellow River has decreased by 75 per cent so that the once mighty river has been reduced to a more or less seasonal body of water that usually dries up 800 km before reaching the sea.

The diagnosis for the Yangtze is equally bleak. Earlier this year, the first annual health report for the river revealed 30 per cent of its major tributaries to be heavily polluted with high levels of ammonia, nitrogen, and phosphorus. In 2006 alone, more than 26 billion tonnes of wastewater was pumped into the Yangtze, which flows through 11 Chinese provinces and municipalities. The report, the combined output of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Water Resources, and the World Wildlife Fund, also stated that one tenth of the main stream of the river was estimated to be in "critical condition."

The grim statistics do not end here. According to SEPA, 70 per cent of China's rivers and lakes are polluted to some degree, 28 per cent too polluted even for irrigation or industrial use. Ninety per cent of the groundwater under cities is also too polluted to drink. As a result, several hundred million Chinese lack access to safe water.

Pollution aggravates China's water scarcity, particularly in the drought-prone north. Already the country's annual per capita water supply is only 2,200 cubic meters, just 25 per cent of the global average, according to the World Bank. Factoring in a combination of trends including rapid urbanisation, continuing industrialisation, and climate change, it is quite likely that water rather than oil will be at the centre of China's coming resource crisis.

Water is the most ubiquitously needed resource, Liu Changming, Director of the United Research Centre for Water Problems (URCWP), points out. "It [water] is needed for industry, for agriculture, and by every living being. We face an energy crisis but we can work on alternative and renewable energy resources. When it comes to the water crisis, there is no alternative for water," he says.

One of the major sources of water pollution is untreated industrial waste that is intentionally or accidentally discharged into rivers. Some 21,000 chemical companies line the Yangtze and the Yellow River. Along with paper, steel, textile, and power plants, these chemical manufacturing units are often in blatant violation of environmental norms for discharge and wastewater treatment.

The crux of the problem underlying the lax enforcement of pollution norms is that for the current generation of local officials economic growth defined solely in GDP terms is the paramount goal. Promotions are usually directly linked to the amount of investment attracted. As a result, implementing environmental laws is often seen as detrimental to both the local economy as well as the career prospects of individual officials.

Collusion between polluters and local officials is also commonplace. Thus even companies equipped with wastewater treatment systems rarely use them given the expense of the power it takes to run the machines. Officials in charge of enforcement are paid to turn a blind eye. That a large number of offending companies are state-owned complicates the issue even further.

One of China's worst-ever pollution spills into its waterways occurred in November 2005 when a blast at a state-owned and managed petrochemical plant in Jilin province led to 100 tonnes of the carcinogenic chemical benzene being discharged into river Songhua. The spill was kept a secret for more than a week. During this time as the 80 km slick made its way towards Harbin, the capital city of China's northeast Heilongjiang province, tens of thousands continued to use the river for drinking and washing.

"The biggest challenge those fighting pollution face is really this lack of transparency and accountability in China," says Ma Jun, author of the influential book, China's Water Crisis, and director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, an NGO.

Redressing pollution purely from the top down through administrative measures, says Mr. Ma, recently named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world, will be doomed to failure in the absence of a more active civil society.

The country also pays a heavy economic price for water pollution. Andres Liebenthal, head of the World Bank's Environment and Social division in Beijing, puts its cumulative health and economic cost at some 2.3 per cent of China's GDP per annum, a figure that is roughly equal to the entire yearly education budget of the government.

The loss to the economy from depletion of groundwater for example is estimated at 50 billion Yuan ($6.5 billion). The costs of using polluted water to industry will come to another 50 billion Yuan. The economic cost of the health impact of pollution including diarrhoea and cancers is placed at half a per cent of GDP.

After decades of either ignoring the water crisis or viewing it solely through the prism of grandiose engineering projects like big dams, Mr. Ma says, Beijing is finally being forced to acknowledge and attempt redress of the real dimensions of the problem. "They [the leadership] cannot afford economically or politically to ignore the issue anymore."

In March 2006, China's 11th Five-Year-Plan thus set a target of reducing pollution discharges by 10 per cent in 10 years time. Although the pollution control goals for 2006 were not met, Premier Wen Jiabao announced earlier this year that he himself would lead a new task force to ensure better compliance with targets in the future. Greater recycling of water and more aggressive treatment of wastewater is also being promoted. A wastewater levy was introduced in 2002, followed by a 2003 regulation that raised fines for polluters.

Beijing is also threatening to cut central government funding to localities that fail to meet pollution-control targets. Some provinces have even announced financial incentives of up to one million Yuan for city officials who prove effective in combating pollution.

The central government's efforts have thus far met with mixed results. Asserting Beijing's will on largely fiscally independent and powerful local governments is more of a formidable challenge than often imagined in India.

But Mr. Ma points out that despite the imperfect way in which the writ of the Centre is, in fact, implemented countrywide, the very fact that the Centre itself is taking serious cognisance of the water crisis holds out hope. "I am optimistic," he says, "because China is still a very top-down country and you need support from the top to achieve anything. That's the first step and we now have that."

What is clear is that unless fundamental policy changes are both made and implemented, China's aspirations to superpower status may be thwarted by something as taken-for-granted as water. For the country's leadership, the management of its water resources is thus a litmus test and the manner in which Beijing passes this test will determine whether China's future will be great or simply thirsty.

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