IN HER 44 YEARS, Zhang Chuanqin has never seen it so dry. Outside her mud-and-thatch home at Zhangdian village in central Anhui province, the rice plants that should be growing past her waist barely reach her knees.
'This is worse than 1994 or 1978,' she grimaced, recalling the last time crops here were completely wiped out by drought. 'Don't be fooled by the colour,' she added, ripping apart an emerald husk to reveal a pinch of tiny grains. 'None of this can be harvested.'
Along the ox path leading from Zhangdian village to the Hehuai highway, a parched shroud hangs over the withering terrain. Roadside gullies that should be flowing with runoff from nearby hills have been transformed into muddy troughs. Ducks waddle through the bottoms of pond basins that hold a smattering of brackish residue. Bean plants yellow beneath a wilting sun.
It is a cruel landscape that can be found throughout much of northern and central China this summer. From Heilongjiang and inner Mongolia, down through Ningxia to Jiangxi and Henan provinces, drought has made this year one of the meanest in recent memory. The central Government estimates that 30 million hectares of farmland have been affected by the lack of rainfall, leaving 35 million people with water shortages throughout the country.
In Anhui province, where the majority of the 61 million inhabitants remain subsistence farmers, the drought's impact has been especially severe. Officially, as many as two million rural residents throughout the province no longer have access to enough water to meet their own personal needs, and as many as 770,000 head of livestock are struggling to survive. More than 1.2 million hectares of cultivated land is in drought, and for more than 460,000 hectares the situation has been labelled severe. The Government puts total crop damage for the summer at a minimum of five billion yuan (about HK$4.7 billion).
But the drought can be measured in other ways. Thousands of villagers, largely in the province's mountainous south, have been forced to abandon their homes in search of safe drinking water. Tens of thousands of others have hit the road, swelling the province's already considerable labour migration, to go as far away as Xinjiang province to find work.