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Rain Water Stored to Ease Thirst on China's Impoverished Land
On the land, sculpted by karst rocks in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, water dripped down through long iron strings or ropes, which have one side pinched on small creeks seeping out from swallets on the high mountain, to sustain the living of impoverished people.
However, located in the subtropical region and facing the Beibu Gulf, Guangxi is far from being short of rainfall. The invention of water tanks and cellars made of rock and cement, which can be used to collect and store rain water, has led to remarkable achievement in eliminating poverty in that area.
The region has 38 percent of its 238,000 square kilometers of land featuring karst rocks, which is neither arable nor compact enough to hold water.
The harsh living conditions, especially the scarcity of drinking water, has made the autonomous region, populated by over a dozen ethic minority groups, one of the remaining impoverished areas in China.
In the past few years, some one million water tanks were built in Dashi (Big Stone) Mountain area in Guangxi through poverty elimination efforts. The area is known as the most impoverished prefecture in the region, easing water shortages for 6.72 million people and several millions of live stocks.
When the first water tank with a capacity of holding 150 cubic meters of water, was built in front of Luo Shangliu's home in 1998, local people began to see miracles happening, fish and ducks swimming in water, grapevine coiling on the bear frame built over the tank.
"We used to grow grains in swallets praying for good weathers to bring us some bare harvest," said Luo, who was the first to try the rain storing method in Guangxi.
Less than a year, stone tanks were built in every household in his village. They bade farewell to governments' grain, which use to sustain them for half a year of living. Water dripping from strings has become a history.
In 1985, Guangxi had 15 million of impoverished population, accounting for one tenth of the country's total. Many ethnic minority people still sustain traditional living styles like their ancestors with no running water, no flat road, and no electricity in their lives.
The central government appropriated some 5 billion yuan of funding for building roads, water conservation and power grid facilities to help the region get out of poverty over the past six years.
Under a variety of poverty relief programs, thousands of mountaineers decided to leave the rocky mountain for the flatlands. However, the building of water tanks has proved effective to help more stay put, and become better off.
In Guangxi, a 40 cubic meter water tank can collect enough rain water to transform 0.07 hectares of dry land into a patch of paddy field, which usually lifts up the rice yield by over 450 kilograms.
By building such a tank, local people can get a 700 yuan government subsidy, which is nearly one-fourth of the investment.
In addition to Guangxi, rain collecting projects have been deployed in a number of other places across the country, where 24 million people suffer from acute water shortages.
By 2000, more than 1.43 million rain-collecting water cellars were dug in arid Gansu Province in northwest China, where water can be hardly found hundreds of meters underground.
The rainwater has eased the water threat for 50 million people and 50 million head of live stocks in China, arousing the attention of experts in countries in West Asia and Africa, which also face serious water problems.
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