Pollution and poor management have worsened the quality of Chinas
increasingly scarce urban water supplies, but the government will spend
US$125 billion in the next five years on the problem, an official said
on Tuesday.
China was now at a "crossroads" in dealing with its urban water
problems, said Qiu Baoxing, vice construction minister, but he ruled out
a large rise in tariffs to encourage water conservation, saying low
Chinese incomes would not permit such a move.
"I can quite clearly tell everyone that the urban water environment in
China is still generally in the process of worsening," Qiu told a news
conference.
"The reasons for this serious situation are many, but there are three
main areas that have not been brought under effective control -- waste
water discharge in cities, industrial effluent and agricultural
pollution," he said.
Per capita water resources in the worlds most populous country are less
than a third of the global average, and falling.
A drought this summer in southwestern China s Chongqing city and Sichuan
province has left more than 18 million people short of drinking water --
greater than the population of the Netherlands.
In China s rapidly growing cities, where people from the much poorer
countryside have flocked in the last few decades, hoping to share in the
countrys economic growth, almost half of all waste water is simply
dumped untreated into rivers and lakes.
More than 50 water treatment plants in some 30 cities only operated
below third of capacity or were not used at all, said Qiu, who was
promoting an international water conference that opens in Beijing next
month.
Leaky pipes and over-use of groundwater have exacerbated the situation,
he added, and have even led to severe subsidence problems in some cities.
Northern China, where a third of the country s population lives, also
suffers from increasingly dry conditions, the official said, reducing
the amount of water available.
But Qiu said the government would spend more than 1 trillion yuan
(US$125.5 billion) in the next five years on new sewage works, pipes,
desalinisation plants and projects like the massive South-North water
diversion scheme.
"We are standing at a crossroads," said Qiu, who admitted to only using
bottled water to make tea because of poor tap water quality in Beijing.
Conservation efforts in some cities including Beijing, which is
preparing for a self-styled "green" Olympics in 2008, have helped cut
water consumption. Zhang Yue, deputy head of the ministrys urban
construction department, said Beijing used 500 million tonnes less water
in 2005 than in previous years.
But Qiu said that raising low water prices to promote conservation was
not an easy option. He said that water costs of US$5 a tonne as in
Boston, or 2.5 euros a tonne in France, would not work in China.
"People s income in China is very low, and we have to think long and
hard about their ability to accept (a price rise)," Qiu said. "We are
not preparing for a large price increase." (US$1=7.966 Yuan)
(Por Ben Blanchard,
Planet Ark, 23/08/2006)