China Villagers Attack Polluting Factories
April 13, 2006 — By Reuters
HONG KONG — About 200 Chinese villagers, angry over pollution of their water supply, attacked three factories and a sewage treatment plant, a Hong Kong newspaper said on Wednesday.
The villagers in the eastern province of Fujian, some armed with iron bars, smashed windows and appliances on Saturday at the sewage plant, two leather factories and a South Korean-invested plastics factory, the South China Morning Post said.
"They rushed into the office building, kitchen, dormitory and grocery store, smashed all the glass, air conditioners and other breakable things and took anything valuable, including kitchen items," the paper quoted the owner of the Xinde Leather Co. in Quanzhou as saying. Three cars were also destroyed, he said.
Police and local officials later broke up the protest.
Protests against polluting industries are common across China's countryside, where the environment has all too often been sacrificed in the pursuit of profits. Outright attacks are less widely reported.
Villagers had complained that discharge from the sewage treatment plant, about 1 km (half a mile) from their homes, had polluted the water supply, damaged crops and created a lingering stench, the newspaper said.
Source: Reuters
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Chinese Premier Warns of Environmental Toll
April 19, 2006 — By Reuters
BEIJING — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has said that dust storms that whipped Beijing and northern China in recent days were a sharp reminder of the severity of the country's environmental problems.
Wen told an environmental meeting in Beijing that China needed to intensify efforts to rein in pollution and environmental destruction, the Xinhua news agency reported.
"The succession of dust storms is a warning to us," Wen was quoted as saying on Monday. "Ecological destruction and environmental pollution are creating massive economic losses and gravely threatening people's lives and health."
A sand storm struck the Chinese capital on Monday covering homes, streets and cars in brown dust and leaving the skies murky yellow as northern China suffered the worst pollution in years.
The Chinese Central Meteorological Station estimated that the storms had enveloped one eighth of the country over recent days.
Two workers died several days ago in ferocious storms in the western province of Gansu, Xinhua said.
Strong winds overnight cleared away the dust over Beijing which is trying to clean up its environment as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics.
But so far this year the city has recorded 56 days with blue skies -- 16 fewer than for the same time last year, Xinhua reported.
Wen said that China has met its economic targets for previous years but fallen short of pollution control goals. In 2005 the country's sulphur dioxide emissions were 27 percent higher than 2000 levels, although the government had set a goal of reducing emissions by 10 percent over that time, he said.
Wen ordered local governments to release information about energy use and pollution output every six months.
An editorial in the People's Daily -- the ruling Communist Party's chief newspaper -- on Wednesday said that despite improvement in some cities, the nation's environmental degradation "remains extremely severe."
"Problems built up over a long time have not been resolved, new ones are emerging, and environmental pollution is dramatically increasing," it said.
Source: Reuters
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China's Waterways Facing Major Chemical Pollution Risks
April 06, 2006 — By Associated Press
SHANGHAI, China — China's major waterways are threatened with severe pollution because of poor planning and a lack of waste treatment facilities, a top environmental official said in remarks published by state media Thursday.
A review of 127 major chemical and petrochemical projects found many were located too close to major bodies of water, the official Xinhua News Agency cited Pan Yue, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Agency, as saying.
"These environmental risks cannot be solved within a short time, as the cost of relocation of the projects is too high," Pan was quoted as saying.
The inspections of the chemical projects, prompted by an explosion last November at a chemical plant that released tons of toxic chemicals in the Songhua River in northeastern China, found 20 with serious environmental safety problems, Pan said.
The projects included oil refining, ethylene and methanol factories involving 60.6 billion yuan (US$7.6 billion; euro6.2 billion) in investments. Eleven were located along the Yangtze River, one on the Yellow River and two at Daya Bay, near Hong Kong.
The government has ordered those plants to take immediate actions to fix the problems, and allocated 1.62 billion yuan (US$202 million; euro165 million) to fund improvements, the report said.
The environmental agency has suspended approval of 44 projects with a total planned investment of 149.5 billion yuan (US$18.7 billion; euro15.3 billion) because of their locations.
China needs to further strengthen pre-construction environmental assessment procedures to prevent future problems, Pan said.
The environmental agency has repeatedly seen its attempts to close down or stop construction of projects accused of violating environmental safeguards overridden or ignored.
The government earlier reported that China has suffered 76 more water pollution accidents since the November spill into the Songhua River.
Some areas have reported progress in cleaning up heavily polluted waters, but most canals, rivers and lakes are severely tainted by industrial, agricultural and household pollution. Only a bit more than a third of the 3.7 billion tons of waste water discharged by China's huge cities each year is treated.
Source: Associated Press
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China Grapples with Growing Water Shortages
April 04, 2006 — By Ben Blanchard, Reuters
YINCHUAN, China — Wang Zhanguo can't remember the last time it rained.
"I think it rained once or twice last year, but I'm not sure," said Wang, a Muslim who lives in China's bleak, remote northwestern region of Ningxia.
"It definitely rained the year before that," he added, sounding a little more certain.
Water -- or rather lack of it -- has shaped Wang's life, living as he does in one of China's most arid regions, where sand dunes lap at fields and dust storms regularly harry its people.
When he was a small boy, his family gave up the struggle of trying to eke crops from the stony, dusty soil and moved from their farm in the even drier southern part of Ningxia to the regional capital, Yinchuan.
Since then, Wang, 23, has worked as a coal miner, a construction worker and a long-distance truck driver. He does not plan to return to the old family farm.
"My grandparents say it used to be much greener before. They say it once rained for an entire week," he said, looking out from the barren Helan mountains outside of Yinchuan at the desert, pitted with dried up river beds and abandoned fields.
But Ningxia is just part of a wider problem -- China is running out of water.
The figures are stark.
Per capita water resources in the world's most populous country are less than a third of the global average, and falling.
More than 300 million people in rural areas lack clean drinking water, and many are being slowly poisoned by water that contains too much fluorine, salt and even arsenic.
UNBEARABLE STRAIN
Tackling these issues is a key part of Beijing's economic and social development plan for the next five years, but the problems are deep-rooted.
More than a decade of near double-digit economic growth coupled with a still expanding population has put an almost unbearable strain on water demand in China.
Pollution is so severe the Ministry of Water Resources estimates 40 percent of water in the country's 1,300 or so major rivers is fit only for industrial or agricultural use.
"The Rhine and the Thames became cesspools during industrialization but China's industrialization is moving so quickly now that it's going to take a gigantic effort to address this," said Dermot O'Gorman, the China representative of the WWF, a global conservation group.
"The negative effects of pollution and the health effects of dirty drinking water can undermine the development on which you depend," he told Reuters.
China's water is also unevenly distributed, and flooding causes serious damage every year in central and southern China.
To address this and help alleviate drought in the north, the government is spending almost 500 billion yuan ($62.29 billion) on a diversion scheme to ship the water north.
One of the rivers to benefit from this plan is the Yellow River, the country's longest and once known as "China's sorrow," for the millions of flood deaths it once inflicted.
The Yellow River today is a shadow of its former self, hit by massive extraction of water for farming and industrial use and declining levels of rainfall. In some years, the river runs dry before reaching the sea.
Ill-conceived irrigation has made matters worse. In arid Ningxia, rice is grown beside the river.
"It's probably the craziest place to grow rice. Look at the evaporation in the summer -- it's 40 degrees Celsius and doesn't see rain for months," said Vaclav Smil, a professor at Canada's University of Manitoba and a China water expert.
"The rational thing would be to shut it down and walk away from it, but now you have all these people depending on it," he told Reuters.
"What would you do with these people? Where would you shove them? Gansu? It would be the same," Smil said, referring to Ningxia's equally dry neighboring province.
SHIFTING SANDS
The prolonged drought has forced Lao Tian to look for alternative forms of work -- sifting for sand to build a new mosque in Xiaokouzi hamlet, in the hills overlooking Yinchuan.
"Life here is very bitter," said Tian, 54, wearing a traditional white Muslim skull cap. "No rain means it's harder to raise crops and I have to find other work."
Signs warning of flash floods are joined by newer arrivals, threatening fines for smoking, the risk of setting the stunted trees on fire now greater than the danger of being swept away by a flood.
In downtown Yinchuan, bold signs proclaim the establishment of a "water-saving city" by 2010, part of a larger government effort to get the man on the street to save water.
"They don't have it and they don't manage it right, but they somehow manage it a little bit better every year so the crisis never fully happens," said Smil.
($1-8.027 Yuan)
(Additional reporting by Shanghai newsroom)
Source: Reuters
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