China's urban water supplies face severe test

andrewwangzhen

Pollution and poor management have worsened the quality of China's increasingly scarce urban water supplies, but in the next five years the government will spend $125 billion on the problem, an official said on Tuesday. China was now at a "crossroads" in addressing urban water problems, said Qiu Baoxing, vice construction minister, but he ruled out a large rise in tariffs to encourage water conservation, saying low incomes would not permit such a move. "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 world's 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 country's economic growth, almost half of all waste water is dumped untreated into rivers and lakes. More than 50 water treatment plants in some 30 cities only operated below a third of capacity or were not used at all, said Qiu, who was promoting the World Water Congress that opens in Beijing next month. Leaky pipes and over-use of groundwater have exacerbated shortages, 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. Qiu said the government would spend more than 1 trillion yuan ($125.5 billion) in the next five years on new sewage works, pipes, desalinization 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 ministry's urban construction department, said Beijing used 500 million metric tons 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 $5 a metric ton as in Boston, or 2.5 euros a metric ton 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." On Tuesday, China's National Development and Reform Commission, which steers economic policy, announced a series of investments to improve water quality. The Commission said on its Web site (www.sdpc.gov.cn) that it would allocate 700 million yuan ($87.9 million) in bonds for garbage and waste water treatment projects in over 50 towns around the massive Three Gorges Dam in southwestern China.