Saturday, July 03, 2010
Central Vietnam dries up
VietNamNet Bridge – Losses to drought are mounting daily in central Vietnam. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) has made an urgent report to the Prime Minister on July 1.
The outlines of the MARD report were briefed on July 1. Members of a MARD mission just returned from Vietnam’s central region confirmed that nearly 200,000 hectares of rice and vegetables are withering. Half of the area suffers from serious drought. At least 15,000 hectares of rice will be a dead loss.
Government meteorologist Tran Van Nguyen says that the central region is experiencing a temporary respite on July 1. However, scorching weather will return from July 3 for about a week. The highest temperature may hit 37-38°C.
A dry westerly from Laos will blow strongly in the next several days, intensifying the drying effect of the hot weather.
Rain will be very rare, nothing more than showers in the mountains.
Nguyen says such drought in central Vietnam has not been seen since 1998. The hot weather will continue until August.
Drought is also drying up also daily water supply. At least 40,000 households in nine districts of Binh Dinh province, on Quang Ngai’s Ly Son Island, and along the lower reaches of the Thu Bon river (Quang Nam) are living without adequate supplies of clean water.
At a meeting chaired by First Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Bui Ba Bong on July 1, Pham Hong Quang, head of the mission to the central region, said that drought most serious in the north central region – the coastal provinces of Thanh Hoa, Nghe An and Ha Tinh.
Quang said that of more than 250,000 hectares of summer-autumn rice, 62,000 are seriously short of water, including 55,000 hectares in the aforementioned provinces. Another 70,000 hectares of ricefields have been left fallow because of drought.
On the central coast, 25,000 hectares of rice and 23,000 hectares of vegetables are reported to lack water. The worst hit provinces are Binh Dinh (6000 hectares), Quang Nam (5000 hectares), Khanh Hoa (5000 hectares), Phu Yen (2000 hectares) and Da Nang (700 hectares).
Quang forecast that if baking sun continues for another five to seven days, losses will rise considerably. Specifically, the north-central region would have to write off another 12,000 hectares rice while losses on the central coast will double to reach 45,000 hectares.
The hot dry weather has persisted for more than two months, drying up rivers, reservoirs and streams in the region.
Major rivers like the Tra Khuc (Quang Ngai), Vu Gia and Thu Bon (both Quang Nam) are all dry. The level of water in reservoir at Quang Ngai’s Thach Nham dam is one meter below the spillway.
“I’ve never seen such a serious drought in my life. Trees can’t live in scorching sun and water shortage like this. Several years ago, the sun was fierce but we still had water,” senior farmer Nguyen Thanh Hung from Dien Ban district (Quang Nam) told VietNamNet.
“God is too cruel! How can we survive in this weather!” lamented senior farmer Le Than.
Most estuaries in the central region have been infiltrated by sea water. As a result, pumping stations are idle.
In Vietnam’s northern region, recent rain has lifted water levels in hydro-power reservoirs to a level at which they can begin producing power again.
Nguyen Lan Chau, a government meteorologist, says that water levels in the Hoa Binh reservoir, the biggest in the north, have reached 85.65 meters, over five meters above the ‘dead level; while at Tuyen Quang reservoir, water levels are up to 98.7m, 8m over the ‘dead level.’
To save over 500 hectares of rice, Tam Ky city, Quang Nam province, spent over 800 million dong ($42,000) to build a dam against salt water intrusion.
On Ly Son island, twenty kilometers off the coast of Quang Ngai province, 110 families have built tanks to collect rain-water when wells became unreliable. However, their tanks are now bone-dry because there has been no rain since mid-March.
Fourteen pumps at Vinh Dien pumping station normally serve nearly 1000 hectares of fields in Dien Ban district and Hoi An town (Quang Nam). Only two can presently be used, drought has raised the salinity of the Hoai river to too high a level for irrigation.
The island’s 20,000 residents must purchase water brought from the mainland on boats. They are being charged as much as 190,000 dong ($10) per cubic meter.
The MARD mission confirmed that central provinces have established steering boards to combat the drought and ordered drastic measures but the situation is not improved. Average temperatures in May and June were nearly 2°C higher than average.
MARD’s Cultivation Department and the General Department of Irrigation have recommended that drought-stricken provinces reconsider where the selection of crops should be changed to cope with drought, dredge canals, redouble efforts to manage irrigation effectively and dig more wells.
MARD will ask the government to mobilize anti-drought assistance urgently for the central provinces.
ADB warns of Asian water crisis
Asia is in the grip of a water crisis that could set back the region’s robust economic growth if left unresolved, says Arjun Thapan, special adviser to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) President Harukiko Kuroda on water and infrastructure issues.
He said governments must start managing the resource better. “We certainly believe that Asia is in the grip of a water crisis and one that is becoming more serious over time,” Thapan told AFP on the sidelines of a water and urban planning conference in Singapore.
“We believe that a recent estimate that Asia faces a 40 percent gap between demand and supply by 2030 is reasonable.”
With 80 percent of Asia’s water used to irrigate agricultural lands, the shortage could have serious implications for food supplies, he warned.
Between 10 and 15 percent of Asia’s water is currently consumed by industry.
Thapan said that the efficiency of water usage in agriculture and industry has improved by only one percent a year since 1990. “It been business as usual. Unless you radically improve the rate of efficiency of water use in both agriculture and in industry, you are not going to close the gap between demand and supply in 2030,” he said.
In China, thermal power generation is the biggest industrial water user, he said, adding that biofuels are also “notoriously water intensive.”
To manage water usage well, Thapan said, people should be charged for the volume that they consume, regardless of whether the water is managed by a private company or a public entity, said Thapan.
“Water cannot any longer be seen as a free and never-ending natural resource. It is a finite resource,” he stressed. “Unless you measure the water that is being used, and you price that water, there is no way in which you can manage the demand.”
While Asia’s rapidly burgeoning cities are key economic drivers, many are also inefficient water users, and this should prompt government policy makers to implement reforms quickly.
Singapore’s National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan told the conference Tuesday that about 200,000 people every day move into cities and towns from rural areas. Every three days, the equivalent of a new city the size of Seattle or Amsterdam emerges, said Mah. By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, up from 50 percent currently.
Thapan called Singapore a good model. The city-state “does a great job of conserving its water by making sure that the price is right, by making sure that waste water is properly reused,” he said. “Israel does that, too. There are lessons to be learned from these experiences.”
Another problem is that a huge volume of waste water in Asia is not treated, leading to massive pollution of rivers and ground water.
Of the 412 rivers in the Philippines, 50 are biologically dead, Thapan said. Between 2.0 billion and 2.5 billion dollars is needed to clean up Manila Bay and Pasig River in Manila alone.
In China, India, and the Philippines, among other Asian countries, the total availability of water per person per year has fallen below 1,700 cubic metres—a global threshold for water stress, defined as a situation where water demand exceeds the available amount during a certain period.
About 50 percent of China’s Yellow River is so polluted it cannot support agriculture, and over 50 percent of the surface water in China’s Hai river basin is not fit for any use, Thapan said.
“There is time, but again much will depend on how quickly you craft your water transformation agendas and how quickly you are able to implement them,” Thapan said.
“This is serious business and unless governments and communities take this seriously now, the water stress will grow.”