Reuters AlertNet Lite - China floods test efforts to narrow urban-rural divide

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FROM THE FIELD

China floods test efforts to narrow urban-rural divide

31 Aug 2007 12:26:00 GMT
Source: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) - Switzerland
By Francis Markus of the International Federation in Chongqing

Website: Website: http://www.ifrc.org

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In Bishan County, Chongqing, 60-year-old Yu Guangfu, is one of the few residents still living in tents (most have moved in with neighbours or relatives); he and many others will still be reliant on relief supplies of rice from the Red Cross Society of China and the government for months to come.
Francis Markus/International Federation

It comes as a shock to see the damage that July's floods have caused in Gaoshan village, like a gaping raw wound in the surrounding green of the rolling hills.

"This year we will have no crops to harvest and we will have a problem with rice. We can't restore this land by ourselves," says 43-year-old Wang Changjin, as he surveys the damage from outside his family's farm house a few meters above the decimated fields.

Until the afternoon of 16 July, this isolated valley held a small reservoir, enclosed by a concrete dam, providing water for a swathe of rice paddies and other crops to sustain the residents.

But all that changed when flood waters surged down the slopes, taking with them soil loosened by a devastating drought last year. The water reduced the reservoir's dam to rubble and washed away the paddy fields below, leaving nothing but bare earth and rocks.

Engineers have already been inspecting the damage and the local government and the Red Cross Society of China have been providing emergency supplies of rice to thousands of farmers, whose crops have been laid waste by the flood waters - not just here but throughout the area.

Chongqing is one of five flood-hit provinces for which the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched an international emergency appeal on 30 July. That appeal, for more than 9.4 million Swiss francs ($7.6 million USD / 5.7 million), aims to raise money for relief supplies, reconstruction work and disaster reduction measures.

It's expected to take several months to rebuild the dam. Luckily, the winter months are the most suitable for construction. But even once that's been done, the task of restoring the paddy fields will require heavy earth moving equipment to bring in fresh soil from elsewhere, and it could take up to two or three years for the ground to be properly cultivable again.

This valley is about 80 kilometres from the urban centre of Chongqing and part of the municipality, which has only had the status of a province since 1997. Often dubbed the world's largest city, Chongqing has a total population of some 31 million, but in fact nearly three-quarters of them live in rural areas.

Just over a month before the floods, the government designated Chongqing and Chengdu, capital of neighbouring Sichuan province, as pilot cities for a new strategy to try to boost rural development, using big urban areas as the engine.

So the July disaster poses an early test for this fresh approach to try to narrow the gap between China's urban and rural areas - not just for the government but for the Red Cross Society of China too.

Officials say the province was hit disproportionately hard for its small size, suffering 76 dead and more than 60,000 homes destroyed.

"In the face of this disaster, we mobilized more quickly than in the past, in getting relief supplies to remote disaster areas," says Du Xinhua, Head of the Relief Department at Chongqing's Red Cross. "And our medical teams arrived on the scene more rapidly."

Some of the places hit by the floods in Chongqing are more remote than others. While there are places which take eight hours to reach from the urban area, others are accessible within little more than an hour.

Bishan county, for instance, lies less than 30 kilometres to the east of the city. Here, work is well underway clearing up the ruins of collapsed houses and laying the foundations for new ones in clusters of around a dozen.

The Red Cross Society of China was prompt on the scene with deliveries of sleeping mats and rice, and officials say that for the next few months, they will be able to supply a quarter of the needs of those whose homes have totally collapsed in the county.

Responding to emergencies like this is only part of what the national Red Cross regards as its task in these rural areas. It's also raising funds to contribute to the building of reservoirs, even if some of them are tiny in scale, so that local villagers no longer face a half-hour walk to the nearest well.

Where wells are the only practical option, the Red Cross is raising funds to help local people drill them. "The government takes care of the larger scale needs but we help with the individual needs that they cannot attend to," says one local RCSC worker.

The patchwork of countryside surrounding the urban area in Chongqing is like a microcosm of China, with its more developed areas and it remote isolated pockets. Even travelling over the dusty track to Gaoshan village to see the devastated reservoir, you come upon sharp differences in the economic conditions from one brow of a hill to the next valley.

Bridging the gaps is the challenge ahead, whether it be in times of emergency or not, and the Red Cross Society of China - supported by the International Federation - has its own clear role to play.

[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

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Last updated:Fri Aug 31 12:31:07 2007