Behind the Headline: Water, Water Everywhere…

In mid-December, Financial Times published a piece about China’s south-north water diversion project. Writer Jamil Anderlini begins the article with a brief description of the project:

“[The government] told us they were moving us to new lands to become rich and prosperous but they’ve thrown us into a fire pit,” sobs Ms Li. “The new land and houses are worthless and our lives there are so bitter.”

The peasant farmer is among the first batch of 440,000 people who will be uprooted to make way for the reservoir and a canal that will carry water from the Yangtze river and its tributaries in the south of China to the arid northern plains and Beijing.

This project, with its echoes of Maoist megalomania, does not fit easily with modern China, where Beijing is making concerted efforts to clean up its tormented environment and foster its own green revolution.

Ken Pomeranz, who has been studying and writing about China’s water control and conservation efforts, wrote the following response to the article.

By Ken Pomeranz

The Financial Times article points to very real problems with the south-north water diversion scheme – and there are others besides. But at the same time, the article is quite one-sided (one would never know, for instance, that Chinese water use in agriculture has already declined close to 20 percent since the 1980s, while production has increased a bit), and it misses the reasons why people who are by no means crazy might think this is an idea worth trying. (I have written on issues related to this project – especially the Western leg of the plan, which is its most ambitious and controversial part – at much greater length elsewhere: an easily accessed version is “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia” in Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 27, 2009.)

On the negative side, it is not at all clear that the Yangzi basin can actually spare the 47 billion gallons per year that would be diverted under the complete version of the plan – particularly since climate change is likely to drastically shrink the Himalayan glaciers that are one important source for the Yangzi. And if the plan decreases the rate of flow in the river, and in some of its principal tributaries – the Han River is a particular point of concern — it will decrease those rivers’ capacity to flush out their pollutants. And the problems of displacing people are certainly real enough.

Moreover, technically speaking, the project is almost certainly inefficient. Its estimated price tag is $65 billion (though less if the Western leg never gets built, as some people, not including me, predict). If you put that much money into fixing leaky faucets, lining irrigation ditches, and improving basic waste-water treatment (allowing more water to be re-used), you would almost certainly do more to relieve pressure on North China’s water supply than the diversion will do. But there are serious obstacles to these solutions. It is not at all clear that Beijing has the capacity to monitor the implementation of such a low-tech, decentralized solution – in other words, to make sure millions of faucets and pipes and so forth get fixed, and, more importantly, stay fixed. If you wanted to make sure that water conservation became and remained a priority in the countryside – which is where something on the order of 80 percent of water use (and an even higher percentage of water waste) occurs, you would need to raise prices dramatically – one recent study (by Scott Rozelle et.al.) suggest that a price hike of 150 percent would be needed to even make a dent in the problem. (You would also need to build a lot of infrastructure – among other things, in much of rural North China, water meters simply don’t exist)

What would such a price hike mean? Almost certainly, a significant reduction in North and Northwest China’s agricultural production – beginning with the winter wheat crop, which is almost entirely dependent on irrigation, and with cotton production. This would mean significantly greater agricultural imports – which China could certainly afford, from a foreign exchange perspective, but which makes officials nervous, both for geo-strategic reasons and because the responses of other countries to possible global food price increases are unpredictable. But probably even more important than these factors would be the social effects. For millions of farmers whose incomes already lag far behind those of urbanites, and whose profit margins are often very thin, more expensive water might well push them off the land and towards the cities –at least seasonally (the end of winter wheat production would mean very high seasonal unemployment) and in many cases permanently. Given the already daunting challenges posed by very rapid urbanization in China, it is not at all clear that one would want to make the process even more rapid. Nor is it clear that one wants to make those who would stay behind in the North China countryside even poorer, as this would certainly do.

So while the water diversion scheme carries enormous risks, and is certainly very far from the optimal solution, it may, by default, become a bad idea whose time has come. It’s not, I think, that people in the government don’t realize that controlling demand (and pollution) may be more promising than increasing supply, or that they aren’t trying to do those things, or that those who support the water diversion scheme are indulging in nostalgia for Maoist gigantism. The real point is that its not at all clear that efficiency gains can be realized fast enough to keep North China, which has about 6 percent of the global average per capita water supply, from facing a devastating water crunch – especially if its people are to see their living standards improve. (Remember, for instance, that even a small increase in the amount of meat people consume increases water demand very sharply.) The project may well be too much of an environmental gamble to undertake, at least in its full-blown form; I lean towards that position myself. But it is a response to very real dilemmas: when the Financial Times article calls it a “pharoanic gesture,” and treats it simply as an anachronistic and brutal act of a government completely heedless of its people, it distorts a much more complicated reality.