Bloomberg News | 10 December 2017:
$40 billion spent so far on aqueducts to feed northern cities. Government taps technology, boosts food imports to save water
Autumn rains came too late to save the stunted stalks of Shu Xinguo’s corn crop, withered by a dry July growing season.
“We rely on the weather for our living,” said Shu, weary and resigned, his tanned hands hoisting bundles of his remaining crop – green and yellow tobacco leaves – onto a three-wheeled tractor. “There’s no water for irrigation, and the well in the village has no water either.”
Sixty kilometers away, China’s largest aqueduct transports as much as 18.3 million cubic meters of fresh water a day through Shu’s province to quench the growing thirst of Beijing in the north. None of it comes to Shu’s village or any of thousands of farms in the region.
It’s China’s age-old dilemma: a tug of war between the farms that help feed the nation, and the soaring demands of industry and city-dwellers in the parched northern plains…
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