Monday, December 6, 2010

Drought and warmer weather threaten Chinese wheat and water supplies

People’s Daily (China): Unusually high November temperatures and low rainfall were threatening water supply and the growth of winter wheat in the North China Plain, a senior water resource official revealed on Saturday. Chen Lei, minister of water resources and deputy director of the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters (SFDH), said at a preparatory meeting on drought relief that temperatures in most agricultural areas since mid-November were 1 C to 4 C higher than in previous years. At the same time there was a sharp reduction in rainfall in the North China Plain.

The SFDH revealed that a wheat planting area of 57.99 million mu (3.87 million hectares) was plagued by a drought caused by higher temperatures and water shortages in areas along the alluvial plain of Yellow River and Huaihe River. Some 1.77 million people and 1.55 million head of livestock have suffered shortages of drinking water.

The drought-affected area accounted for 19 percent of the country's winter wheat planting area. The drought's influence on next year's wheat yield was hard to determine as the yield will also depend on subsequent weather and drought relief work, Lu Bu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), told China Daily on Sunday.

In North China's Shanxi province, winter wheat in a planting area of 2.4 million mu (160,000 hectares) is suffering from drought, although it is not severe. The situation is likely to continue given the lingering windy and dry weather, Wang Zhiwei, deputy chief of Shanxi provincial climate center, told China News Service (CNS) on Thursday.

…Chen said the drought was expanding rapidly, and the situation was even worse in areas without enough reserve water....

Kangxi Chinese radical 199 "mài" (U+9EA5), which apparently means wheat, created by Magna, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

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