by Oliver Engelen
On a long train ride from the south-west to the north-east of China in 2005, I found myself sitting opposite a little girl with extremely thick glasses – the kind normally worn by old, nearly blind people. She was traveling with her father to the central city of Xi’an for her once-in-a-year visit to an oculist. The father told us that his daughter’s eyesight had been ruined because she grew up drinking heavily polluted water. And her case, I learned not much later, was far from unique.
a lake near Jinan, Shandong
Having lived in a northern province for some time, I had been well aware that China wasn’t a place where water is available in abundance. Yet this was the first time I realized that access to safe drinking water is a really big problem here. When children – tens of thousands of children – are half blind before they enter primary school, something is very, very wrong. Visually impaired children, deformed babies, the population of whole villages dying from mysterious forms of cancer; wells running dry, huge areas of arable land lost year by year to the advancing deserts, cities enshrouded in sandstorms, blackened rivers without any fish, lakes overgrown with slimy algae, jellyfish of monstrous size populating the coastal waters: These are all signs of a large-scale natural disaster happening right in front of our eyes.
Water needs a price tag …
We all need water to live, just as we need air. Both are similar in another respect, too: They are prone to being polluted so badly they are no longer safe. Making sure they are kept, or made, clean can be a major challenge. Yet while air surrounds us, with water things are different. Water, just like air, is a public good – but clean water is not. Most freshwater, as we find it in nature, is not suitable for drinking; moreover, modern industry and agriculture pollute it. Water must be processed before people can safely use it: This is costly. Also, water doesn’t tend to be where we need it. In most places where people live it isn’t available all year round just by itself. It must be delivered. Nobody can live without it, so water is undoubtedly a public need. Providing people with clean water is a service which needs to be paid for. Most problems associated with lack of access to clean water have to do with the fact that the price of water doesn’t reflect this.
China is a case in point. The country is classified as one of 13 water-scarce countries by the United Nations. Per capita water consumption in China is only one quarter of the global average. The northern part of the country, where about 40% of the population live and where some 60% of its crops are grown, gets only a fifth as much rain as the rest of the country.
a village well in Shandong Province
Groundwater tables have been falling for decades and in some regions, there is simply no groundwater left. Last winter there was so little rainfall in parts of northern China that people couldn’t even get sufficient drinking water from local wells – it had to be shipped in by water truck. Crops in the fields could not be irrigated at all so there was no harvest. At present rates of water consumption, the groundwater all over northern China will be exhausted in the next decade. In rural areas, more than one in three Chinese are without access to safe drinking water. A quarter of surface water sources are disqualified as drinking water sources, according to official figures, and long stretches of China’s rivers are polluted so severely that water can’t even be used for irrigation.
… even where water levels are high
The situation is somewhat different in the south, which gets a lot more rainfall than the north. Yet even here, tens of millions of people have no access to safe drinking water. Poor-quality or nonexistent sanitation systems are to blame. Hardly any wastewater from households, agriculture and industry is treated. Sewage seeps into the freshwater supply. Fertilizers are washed into the lakes and rivers. Much of China’s industry is concentrated in the south of the country. None the less, the sheer amount of water available in the south has given rise to grand schemes like the “south-north water diversion project”, which proposes to channel water over thousands of miles from the southern river basins to the parched northern plains. The technical feasibility of this project, which dates back to the Maoist 1960s, is increasingly being questioned by Chinese experts. Moreover, it has become clear that the social, economic and environmental costs of such a scheme would be huge. Most importantly, though, the amount of water in the southern river basins like the Yangtze is likely to drop sharply as a result of climate change in the greater Himalaya region. Whether southern China will have any water to spare 20 or 30 years from now is very much open to question.
Given this scarcity, you would expect the price of water to be high, reflecting the relative value of this resource, and you would expect all sorts of measures to be taken in order to save water, recycle used water and protect the water supply. In reality, however, widespread pollution, little processing of sewage water and inadequate sanitation are complemented by wastage on a huge scale. At about one-tenth of the price in countries like Germany – where water is far less scarce – water is very cheap in China. In fact, it is heavily subsidized by the state and by loss-making water utilities.
To be sure, most Chinese people are a lot poorer than people in the so-called “developed countries”, so water has to be a lot cheaper. But even taking this into account, water is still extremely cheap: What the average Chinese family pays for water as a percentage of its income is less than a third of the international average. At the same time, tremendous amounts of water are lost due to inefficient use in agriculture; Chinese industry needs 5 to 10 times more water to produce something than industry in countries where water is far less scarce. Cities can afford to water their parks and sports stadiums in the middle of summer while in neighboring villages the wells run dry – and while ordinary people are asked to “save every drop”. From the way China uses water, you would think it has it in abundance.
Clean water access first
At the same time, access to water is clearly a key factor for economic development and wealth. This is why Amity in its water-related work has concentrated on providing access and will continue to do so. While the big questions of climate change, environmental protection, fair distribution, conservation and sustainable use of water in China urgently need to be addressed by both the state and non-governmental organizations, it is by no means less important that people all over the country have easy access to as much water as they need. Productivity tends to grow strongly once access to water is ensured – for the simple reason that people needn’t waste their precious time fetching water anymore and can engage in more productive activities instead. In many regions of China, water projects are an essential element of poverty relief. It goes without saying that water needs to be clean and safe to use; this can be guaranteed only if comprehensive modern sanitation systems are installed. Chances are that the focus of water projects in China will shift to this area soon.
