Silt, Pollution Will Cripple Yangtze River Within 10 Years- Interfax

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Shanghai. (Interfax-China) - "Experts have said that pollution and silt in the Yangtze River are so serious that it is in danger of becoming as bad as the Yellow River within ten years. With the forest on the banks shrinking severely, and with the native species of dolphin, sturgeon and saury probably extinct, life in the river is disappearing, according to experts, and the environment is facing crisis. As Interfax has been reporting, the Yellow River has been reduced to a mere trickle at several points, and for long stretches of the year, it fails to reach the eastern coast as a result of the heavy levels of silt. Meanwhile, serious and long-term deforestation along the banks of the river has exacerbated the threat of floods in certain regions. In other parts of the nine provinces through which the Yellow River passes, conflicts over the use of scarce water resources have also become more frequent.

The environment is set to become one of the biggest political battlegrounds in China over the next few years, with opinion divided on the extent to which China's rivers are being ruined by excessive development, and on the degree to which such development should be pursued still further. The Yangtze, of course, is central to these debates. Its upstream branch, the Jinsha River, has two large-scale hydropower stations at Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba already under construction, with more being planned. Its prosperous delta regions in the east are facing the problems of pollution, and on the middle reaches lies the most controversial project of all at the Three Gorges.

Speaking to Interfax at a press conference on "China's engineering achievements" held on Friday, Sun Changping, the spokesman for the Three Gorges Project Corporation, refused to be drawn on the comparison with the Yellow River, saying that it was "impossible to predict the situation in ten years time". He then drew attention to the Ecology and Environmental Supervision Report issued by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) in 2002, which claimed that the situation on the Yangtze was quite normal.

Cao Qingrao, the head of the Propaganda Department of China's Forestry Commission, then dismissed the arguments. "The Yangtze cannot possibly become the new Yellow River," he told Interfax. "The silt levels on the river are actually lower than they were five years ago, and the government has implemented regulations to handle the problems of pollution." Nevertheless, official Xinhua reports this week cited Chen Bangzhu, the head of the China People's Political Consultative Conference Committee on Population, Resources and the Environment, who said that uncontrolled logging on the upper and middle reaches of the river has led to serious bank erosion. This in turn has caused several hundred million tons of extra silt to sweep down into the lower reaches, threatening the ecosystem and population in the region. Furthermore, the blind pursuit of profit has led a number of enterprises downstream to treat the river as their own personal waste outlet, Chen noted."

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