Value Water Conservancy Construction to Ensure Stable Agricultural Production

Since the beginning of summer, a severe drought has swept across 12 provinces and autonomous regions nationwide, with more than 72 million mu of crops affected. The worst hit is Henan Province, China's second-largest grain-producing province, which has suffered its most severe drought in 63 years. According to forecasts by the meteorological department, in August the drought in North China, the Huang-Huai region, the Jiang-Huai region, and the Jiang-Han region may persist or worsen, creating an unfavorable situation of a combined summer-autumn drought, and the outlook for drought relief is not optimistic.

If one looks back at historical records, one will find that in recent years China has every year seen severe droughts in some local areas, so the public no longer finds it surprising. Second, unlike natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods that unleash destructive force in an instant, drought is a sustained condition; the former require immediate rescue and a race against time, while the latter is in a state of “boiling a frog in warm water,” and cannot be rescued or mitigated by human effort within a short period.

Precisely for this reason, we cannot attribute drought entirely to natural disaster. Local droughts can be overcome; unlike earthquakes, floods, and other sudden outbursts of destructive force, the damage brought by drought can be greatly reduced through the construction of systematic water conservancy facilities. Only in a relatively pure age of agricultural civilization would drought be regarded as entirely a natural disaster.

Over the past thirty-plus years, water conservancy facilities in some areas have fallen into disrepair after long use, and a large number of damaged facilities have left the capacity to respond to disasters extremely fragile. This is because, over the past thirty-plus years, governments at all levels have built large and small hydropower projects on a massive scale, and this was for economic purposes, since hydropower can bring huge revenue to the locality; investment in rural water conservancy not only contributes nothing to government finances (the agricultural tax has already been abolished), but also means the locality must spend considerably, so some local governments have neglected agriculture and water conservancy, been unwilling to invest, or argued that the locality lacks the financial resources to invest and needs support from the central government.

Hydropower projects have been assigned many functions such as power generation, water supply, flood control, and drought relief, but in fact, apart from power generation, the other functions are very difficult to bring into play; for example, during droughts the upstream areas intercept the flow level by level, and when floods come the sluice gates are opened to release floodwater, and these situations instead intensify the contradiction between the supply of and demand for water resources.

In the 2008 stimulus plan, a considerable portion of the investment went to water conservancy. But judging from reports from various places afterward, many of these water conservancy projects became “image projects.” In future water conservancy construction, wasting public funds should be avoided, and full consideration should be given to the role these projects should play when drought strikes. Consideration in this regard should be as a whole, because each locality usually has its own starting point.

As global warming brings more and more extreme weather and instability, a country whose grain supply mainly relies on itself needs to value water conservancy construction and stabilize agricultural production. Autumn grain accounts for 70% of the year's grain output, and Henan's grain output accounts for one-tenth of the national output; the drought in Henan will not only affect national grain output but also leave some local people with no harvest at all. The former can be alleviated through imports, but the reduction in local farmers' income cannot be made up.