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Saving countryside from drought and unemployment are top priority
Source: Xinhua |
February 13, 2009, Friday
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FAN Fuzhong scoops up a handful of soil from his wheat field and lets the gray dust sift between his fingers.
"I've never seen such a severe drought. Some seedlings are yellow and some are dead," says the 37-year-old farmer, who lives with his family in a populous village in central China's Henan Province.
Though the authorities used cloud-seeding technology to create rain on Saturday, Pan's 0.4 hectare-harvest will still be well down.
As of Monday, around 9.1 million hectares of winter wheat in eight major producing provinces was affected.
In addition, 3.5 million people and 1.66 million livestock had no access to drinking water.
Henan, which produces a quarter of China's wheat, is worst hit. Since October, it has received 10mm of rain, 80 percent less than average, making it the worst drought since 1951.
The Agriculture Ministry has no estimates of wheat yield losses this year, but a senior weather official said on February 3 that production was likely to be down 2 to 2.5 percent from last year.
Henan Party chief Xu Guangchun said the drought had affected people's livelihoods and could undermine social stability.
The sources of income for China's 700 million rural people are the sale of produce, remittances from migrant workers, government subsidies and property-related business.
More than 20 million rural migrants, 15.3 percent of the 130 million migrants working outside their hometowns, have returned home without jobs as a result of the global financial crisis.
With this year's 7 million new entrants to the rural labor market, China will have 25 million jobless rural people.
Saving the countryside must be China's top priority.
"I've never seen such a severe drought. Some seedlings are yellow and some are dead," says the 37-year-old farmer, who lives with his family in a populous village in central China's Henan Province.
Though the authorities used cloud-seeding technology to create rain on Saturday, Pan's 0.4 hectare-harvest will still be well down.
As of Monday, around 9.1 million hectares of winter wheat in eight major producing provinces was affected.
In addition, 3.5 million people and 1.66 million livestock had no access to drinking water.
Henan, which produces a quarter of China's wheat, is worst hit. Since October, it has received 10mm of rain, 80 percent less than average, making it the worst drought since 1951.
The Agriculture Ministry has no estimates of wheat yield losses this year, but a senior weather official said on February 3 that production was likely to be down 2 to 2.5 percent from last year.
Henan Party chief Xu Guangchun said the drought had affected people's livelihoods and could undermine social stability.
The sources of income for China's 700 million rural people are the sale of produce, remittances from migrant workers, government subsidies and property-related business.
More than 20 million rural migrants, 15.3 percent of the 130 million migrants working outside their hometowns, have returned home without jobs as a result of the global financial crisis.
With this year's 7 million new entrants to the rural labor market, China will have 25 million jobless rural people.
Saving the countryside must be China's top priority.
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