President Hu Jintao sounded a warning note during his lunar New Year visit to North China?s Hebei province. He urged the need for adequate measures for preventing drought and ensuring that the summer grain output does not suffer. His statement came on the back of Northern China being affected by severe drought for more than three months and worries over dips in grain output.
For a country historically emphasising and acting on self-sufficiency in agriculture, worries over dwindling agricultural output appear unusual. More so, considering China?s exalted position in the world economy. The drought though draws attention to what many have feared for a long time: the lack of adequate water for supporting agriculture.
The dimensions of the drought are alarming. Official agencies indicate that areas in North China have gone without rainfall for more than 120 days. Rizhao in Shandong province is suffering its worst drought in the last 300 years. Beijing is not far behind?having not seen any rain or snow for almost 100 days now. There is little hope of rain kicking in over the next few days going by meteorological forecasts.
At stake for China is the entire winter wheat crop, spread over more than five million hectares. The Yellow river basin catering to the north and upper Eastern provinces of China is the worst affected. The drought, while harming wheat grain prospects, has also had other impacts. Lack of drinking water in affected areas has become a major worry. The crisis has not assumed alarming proportions as it is still winter. But with summer approaching, water shortages are expected to become more acute. As the water resources minister Chen Lei has pointed out, more than 60% of Chinese cities are short on water. A dry summer will make matters worse.
China?s comfortable buffer stocks should prevent the supply scarcity from maturing into a food crisis. It can also fall back on imports if the need arises. But what cannot be overlooked is the distressing depletion of water resources. Along with urbanisation, depletion of water and lack of irrigation has led to total volume of arable land in China shrinking by more than 8 million hectares over the last 10 to 12 years. Persistence of the trend can have serious implications.
Irrigated area, as a percentage of total land area in China, has hardly experienced much increase over the last couple of decades. Surface water from the Yellow and Yangtze rivers has not been efficiently utilised for irrigation. Some analysts argue that this is on account of diversion of water resources to industrial use. Whatever the reason be, as the Chinese Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu pointed out a few months ago, China?s irrigation system is in a poor shape, with more than half of the arable land lacking basic irrigation facilities.
Conservation of water resources, unfortunately, has not received as much attention as it should have from local governments in China. The provincial authorities have been more focused on larger income-generating projects in their territories that have ?visible? economic impact rather than water conservation and irrigation. The tendency is not difficult to explain. There are more career incentives for local officials in securing big income-generating projects contributing directly to GDP rather than measures yielding slow benefits over time. But with local governments responsible for funding the maintenance of existing irrigation facilities, unless incentives are corrected, efficient maintenance is unlikely.
Ironically, measures that led to rapid improvement in agricultural productivity and grain output in China have probably adversely affected irrigation facilities over time. The shift from collective to individual farming since the late 1970s, while offering incentives to farmers for increasing output, also led to the erosion of ownership rights of collectives over water resources. Ambiguous property rights were a deterrent for investment by local governments in water resources. At the same time, following major changes in the tax structure in 1994, tax revenues flowing to local governments from the Centre declined. This, in turn, affected their abilities to spend.
Lack of adequate surface water irrigation has forced farmers to rely more on groundwater. This has been accompanied by a steady increase in private ownership of tube wells. The situation is similar to well ownership in India?s Punjab, where collective ownership of wells has steadily made way for individual ownership. And this is where problems have arisen in managing a public good like water through private means. Though several experts argue that the privatisation of wells has helped in offsetting water scarcity in Northern China, this has also probably led to the over-exploitation and depletion of groundwater tables. Returning to collective ownership though is not the solution since agricultural land use rights have been privatised.
The Chinese government has decided to spend 10% of its revenues from land transfer on water conservancy projects in 2011. This is definitely a welcome step. But despite best intentions, results might remain limited till distorted incentives are corrected in China?s countryside.
?The author is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies in the National University of Singapore. These are his personal views