The Chinese government will build about 160,000 embankment dams
on the tributaries of the Yellow River over the next 17 years to
prevent soil erosion and filter out silt from the water, according
to a senior water resources official.
The long-term project involves a combined investment of 83
billion yuan (around US$11 billion). It is expected to curb soil
erosion on the upper reaches of the Yellow River and prevent
surrounding topsoil from falling into the river and causing
flooding.
"As of 2020, when construction of these dams is finished, the
silting up of the lower reaches of the Yellow River will have been
radically changed," claimed Li Guoying, director of the Yellow
River Water Resources Commission of China's Ministry of Water
Resources.
The Yellow River has made Huangtu Plateau, or Loess Plateau, in
western China, one of the world's worst areas suffering soil
erosion, where an estimated 1.6 billion tons of sediment flows into
the river annually.
While China has in recent years brought floods under control
through strengthened river embankments and the construction of
reservoirs, silt continues to be deposited in the lower reaches and
the river bed is rising at a rate of about one meter every 10
years.
The building of these soil-retention structures, at the bidding
of China's Ministry of Water Resources, is expected to block as
many as 700 million tons of soil and sand every year.
China began building the embankment dams around 1980. There are
currently more than 110,000 such dams on the Huangtu Plateau, with
a combined soil filter quantity exceeding 21 billion tons.
The building of the dams on the Yellow River and the Yangtze
River, China's longest, has long incurred strong criticism within
China and abroad, with environmentalists alleging the trapped silt
and nutrients behind the dam have led to the shrinking of the delta
on the lower reaches and damaged fish stocks and the fertility of
farmland downstream.
However, some people have benefited, such as the owners of the
farmland around the dams.
"The soil erosion used to result in low agricultural
productivity, but with the fertile dammed land, my family do not
starve now," said Mi Jun, a farmer who lives on the Huangtu
Plateau.
The 5,464 meter-long Yellow River originates on the
Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, winds its way through nine provinces and
autonomous regions, and empties into the Bohai Sea in east China's
Shandong Province.
The river supplies water to 12 percent of China's 1.3 billion
people and 15 percent of its farmland.
(Xinhua News Agency September 15, 2007)
