China has declared a top-level emergency plan for the country’s worst drought in five decades that has hit eight wheat-growing northern provinces and left more than 4 million people without proper drinking water.
The crisis was raised on late Thursday to level one emergency from level two, the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief said on its Web site.
That means the Flood Control and Drought Relief office takes control of the relief effort. It also triggers help from railway, civil aviation and other transport departments.
The announcement said rainfall in many parts of northern and central China has been 50 to 80% less than normal rainfall, and that 4.29 million people and more than 2 million livestock were without proper drinking water.
China suffers from an uneven distribution of its water resources. Availability of water for a person in north is less than one-fourth that in southern China. Weather patterns in the arid north and flood-prone south cost the government tens of millions of dollars in lost productivity each year.
The announcement said that the drought, which began in November, has affected 25.5 million acres (10.33 million hectares) of crops.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported that almost half of the wheat crop in the eight provinces — Hebei, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi and Gansu — were threatened. About 43 percent of the country’s winter wheat supplies are at risk,
after some areas have seen no rain for 100 days or more.
Xinhua reported that President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao had ordered all-out efforts to fight the drought at a Cabinet meeting Thursday. It said the government had allocated 400 million yuan ($58.5 million) for relief work.
Television news broadcasts have shown dry, cracked farm fields and crops withering in the ground.
State media has reported that the drought was the worst in some areas since the early 1950s.
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