China's irrigation system has deteriorated gradually in the past three decades, plagued by a growing number of malfunctioning facilities and worsening water problems in rural areas. This article argues that the decline of irrigation in China is mainly derived from its marginal position in the Chinese economy, which has been oriented towards pursuing rapid GDP growth over the last three decades at the expense of irrigation and agriculture.
With only seven percent of water resources but 20 percent of population
in the world, China relies on irrigation to produce 70 percent of its
grains. While the irrigation system assumes such an important place in
the country’s food security, it has declined and even broken down in
parts of the country in the past three decades, a period during which
the Chinese economy grew at an average annual rate of more than nine
percent. According to a 2009 Chinese official report, more than half of
the large irrigation zones and more than 60 percent of the medium-sized
irrigation zones were not functioning well, and more than 85 percent of
the large pumping stations were in urgent need for reconstruction (NPCC,
2009). It is reasonable to believe that the smaller irrigation
facilities are in an even worse condition because they are much more
underfunded. The decline of the irrigation system has posed serious
livelihood risks to hundreds of millions of people and undermined
China’s capacity for food production.
To find out the nature and causes of the decline of the irrigation
system in China, I examined government documents and statistical data on
economic planning, public investment, agriculture, and irrigation for
the past three decades. In addition, I designed and conducted a
three-month field research in a county of central China in the summer of
2010. I carried out about forty in-depth interviews with officials and
farmers on their opinions and experiences with irrigation. I also
visited a number of irrigation facilities including reservoirs, dams,
canals, ditches and irrigation ponds. My field research was supported by
the East Asian Studies Program and the Institute for Global Studies at
the Johns Hopkins University.
I found that the decline of the irrigation system in post-reform China
is mainly derived from the marginal position of irrigation in an economy
that pursues maximum GDP growth. More specifically, agriculture, the
main sector that irrigation serves, has contributed less and less to GDP
growth after the reforms in the 1980s. Thus it has become less
important on the government agenda and has received decreasing efforts
from various pertinent actors including the central government, local
governments, and farmers. The practice that maximizes GDP growth and the
ideology that legitimizes it has been referred to as GDP fetish or growth fetish
by critical development scholars, in that it pursues unsustainable GDP
growth while at the expense of food security, environment, and human
health (Hamilton, 2003; Stiglitz, 2009; Stiglitz et al, 2009).
The central government
The Chinese central government is the national policy maker that steers
the direction of the national economy. The issues of irrigation were
marginalized within the government and received low priority in economic
planning. In the 1980s, it drastically cut irrigation investment by
more than 40 percent. Between 1981 and 1997, the share of irrigation in
total infrastructure investment had never exceeded three percent, down
from nearly seven percent in the pre-reform period (NSBC, 2009: 79). By
contrast, industrial investment, which could lead to rapid GDP growth,
had received favorable government support in terms of bank loans,
government funds and political priority in the 1980s and 1990s. In the
1990s, particularly after Mr. Deng Xiaoping’s tour of southern China in
1992, coastal areas and large cities received a great amount of
investment and favorable policies (e.g. tax policy) to construct special
economic zones, which aimed to draw foreign direct investment, promote
export-oriented industrial production and accelerate GDP growth (Huang
2008: 109-174). The principle that economic growth must be the focus of
government work was written in all important government documents. As
Mr. Deng himself called it, “Development is the absolute principle”. The
connotation of his development is economic growth, or simply GDP growth
(Deng, 1993: 370-383).
Underinvestment and negligence had led to the decline of the irrigation
system. In 1998, huge summer floods swept through China and caused
tremendous damages. The floods exposed the vulnerability of the
irrigation system and deeply alarmed the Chinese central authority.
After 1998, the central government increased annual irrigation
investment and called for more attention to irrigation. However, under
the GDP fetish, the irrigation system was still marginalized on the
government’s agenda.
With the exposure of the severity of irrigation problems in recent
years, and the hard reality that China must rely on domestic production
for most of its food consumption, particularly at a time of global food
crisis, the central government has altered its earlier position and
started to assign more priority to irrigation. In 2008, the central
government emphasized the importance of agricultural infrastructure
including irrigation in the No.1 policy document, which has been issued
at the beginning of every year to signify government policy priorities.
In 2011, it used the entire No. 1 document to address irrigation decline
and water problems, and reiterated the importance of irrigation for
food production and security. The government planned to invest 4
trillion yuan ( about 608 billion U.S. dollars) in irrigation projects
for the next decade to improve water conservation and expand irrigated
areas (Jin, 2011).
Whether the central government’s plan to improve the irrigation system
can be realized remains to be seen. It is constrained on the one hand by
the deeply rooted GDP fetish in the political system and on the other
by other actors involved in irrigation, particularly local governments
and villages.
Local government
Local governments are the national policy implementer and local policy
maker. According to my field research, local governments also
wholeheartedly embrace GDP growth while showing little interest in
irrigation. I have found that even when the central government calls for
more effort on irrigation recently, local governments continue to
ignore the need to improve irrigation. This is because the Chinese
political system has become much more decentralized after the reforms,
and local governments may pursue their own interests while ignoring
national policies.
Local governments usually focus on projects that can boost GDP growth,
such as industrial zones, urban real estate, roads and tourist sites.
Even when they do invest in water project, they tend to invest in those
that could stimulate economic growth rather than those that meet
irrigation needs. In the past three decades, the county where my field
research took place only built one new large dam, which was built in
2006 and received 22 million yuan (about 2.75 million U.S. dollars) from
the county government. However, the main function of the dam is not to
irrigate farmland but to create a beautiful urban scene that could boost
the prices of real estate around the water. An irrigation official told
me that, although the county bureau of water resources was responsible
for the project, it was top county leaders who decided the site of the
dam. He said, “As irrigation experts, my colleagues and I do not think
that the site of the dam should be the place where it is now.”
The only time that local officials pay attention to the irrigation
system is in the event of natural disasters. They must take action to
avoid human casualty and serious property damages. However, such
discursive and unsystematic effort is far from sufficient to prevent the
breaking down of the irrigation system.
Villages and farmers
The GDP fetish also affects the irrigation effort of villages and small
farmers, who are usually the users of irrigation water and the
important maintainers of irrigation facilities. Due to the cutting of
irrigation funds and the concentration of both public and private
resources in the sectors that can stimulate rapid GDP growth,
agriculture, the main sector that irrigation serves, has become less and
less important in rural households’ livelihood strategy. The problem is
particularly serious in China because every farmer only cultivates a
very small piece of farmland, smaller than 0.3 hectare on average. As a
result, they are more willing to take up non-agricultural businesses or
migrate to the city than to work on farming.
In the county where I conducted fieldwork, farming only generated
2103.6 yuan (about 300 U.S. dollars) in 2008 for each rural resident on
average, accounting for 21.8 percent of per capita gross income. In
other words, farming only contributed about one fifth of income to rural
households in the county. As a consequence, rural households tend to
divert their effort away from irrigation and agriculture to more
profitable businesses. According to local statistics, only 37.7 percent
of rural laborers were engaged in agriculture (including animal
husbandry) in 2008, while more than 60 percent of rural laborers were
working in non-agricultural sectors. However, most rural households
still rely on grain farming for their food supply. Therefore, they take
some effort on irrigation and wish irrigation facilities running well.
But their action is not enough to rescue broken irrigation facilities.
Conclusion
The irrigation decline has undermined the capacity of food production
and threatened food security in China.Moreover, if China’s domestic food
production cannot meet its consumption demand, it will be forced to
import more food from the global market, thus pushing up food prices and
causing food shortages in other developing countries. The increase in
food imports to China in recent years has already caused concerns and
worries in other countries. My study suggests that the GDP fetish must
be suppressed and replaced by a people/environment-centered development
strategy if China wants to save its irrigation system and ensure food
security. The GDP fetish is a global phenomenon and practiced in many
countries. Without changing it, food security, human health and
long-term ecological sustainability would be sacrificed for short-term
economic growth.
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