Op-Ed Contributors

Time to pay the water debt

By Li Yang (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-02-01 07:56

Local governments need to start focusing on funding water conservancy projects to make up for neglect of past decades

It is not hard to understand why Chinese history is sometimes viewed as a chronicle of the people's struggles with water and food shortages. Like a malevolent ghost stalking the land, famine has been a constant concern for the country's rulers, and the stability and legitimacy of their rule depended on their ability to feed the people.

The specter of famine still haunts the government despite the fact that people are now in thrall to modernization. Even as the country's arable land continues to shrink, from 129.67 million hectares in 1998 to 121.22 million hectares in 2010, it faces an even greater threat than urbanization, the decline of the irrigation system.

"About one third of the irrigation facilities for the 53.33 million hectares of irrigated farmland in China have already deteriorated after years of neglect," says Feng Guangzhi, chairman of the China Irrigation Districts Association.

Poor maintenance of water conservancy projects makes the ever more scarce farmland, especially in western China, extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, and Feng says that droughts and floods reduce the country's potential grain output by about 20 million tons every year.

"With nearly no input from the central and local governments, the 1980s can be regarded as the low point for agricultural water conservancy in China. It was only in the early 1990s that the central government started constructing farmland irrigation systems again," Feng says.

The investment on water facilities accounted for only 0.435 percent of GDP on average from 2007 to 2009, about half the amount required, according to the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, which found that the ideal share of water conservancy infrastructure construction in GDP is between 0.79 and 0.84 percent.

And, as Zheng Fengtian, deputy director of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development with Renmin University of China, points out, a considerable amount of water conservancy funds are diverted to lucrative hydropower reservoirs.

Feng says, merely 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) was used for farmland irrigation works in 2010 out of about 200 billion yuan set aside for national water works, such as flood control projects.

The central government has promised in its No 1 Document of 2011 - typically regarded as an indicator of the government's priorities - to spend 10 percent of its revenue from this year's land transfers on farmland water conservancy projects in 2011. According to the Ministry of Land and Resources, land transfer fees in 2010 were 2.7 trillion yuan, which means the investment on farmland water works, if it remains at the same level, will be about 270 billion yuan this year, more than the overall funding for all water conservancy works in 2010.

This unexpected increase in funds came after the first drop in the summer grain output in six years. More than 3 percent of the yearly output of the country, 16.8 million tons, was lost as a result of droughts. Zheng says that recent climate changes have highlighted the poor condition of farmland water systems and food security concerns have focused the central authority's attention on farmland water conservancy projects.

Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu admitted in November 2010 that food security is built on shaky foundations given the poor condition of much of the farmland irrigation system and the fact that more than half of the arable land in China lacks any basic irrigation.

Even with the proposed investment, we will still not be able to pay the historical debt from the 1980s and 1990s unless local governments fulfill their water conservancy responsibilities. It is the duty of local governments to build and maintain the farmland irrigation network.

Although the central authority sets aside special funds every year, local governments are expected to cover 30 to 50 percent of the costs of agricultural water conservancy, something they have conspicuously failed to do, given the current state of the country's irrigation systems.

Many local government officials care more about GDP growth and one-off, high-profile projects than irrigation systems and agricultural infrastructure, which directly serve grain production, a notably poor contributor to GDP, and which require constant investment and timely maintenance and are usually located in remote areas. That's why grassroots policy executors seldom spend money on farmland water works until droughts and floods force them to do so.

The author is a reporter with China Daily.

(China Daily 02/01/2011 page8)