Multi-year drought conditions in China will soon bring the country to the brink of collapse which will trigger a global famine, scientists have warned.
China’s grain and electricity production is about to fail, which will result in devastating shortages of food, industrial materials, and consumer goods.
The water disruption in China will be felt by the entire world as the communist country is a major producer of food, energy and other essential goods and materials.
Naturalnews.com reports: “Unlike other commodities, water does not have any viable substitutes,” reports Foreign Affairs. “It is essential for growing food, generating energy, and sustaining humanity.”
“For China, water has also been crucial to the country’s rapid development: currently, China consumes ten billion barrels of water per day – about 700 times its daily oil consumption. Four decades of explosive economic growth, combined with food security policies that aim at national self-sufficiency, have pushed northern China’s water system beyond a sustainable level, and they threaten to do the same in parts of southern China as well.”
Fresh water has been a problem in many parts of Asia for some time now. In Hong Kong, for instance, seawater has been used to flush toilets for several decades now.
In China as of the year 2020, water availability in the North China Plain has been at least 50 percent below what the United Nations considers to be a situation of acute water scarcity. The situation is the same or worse in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.
The North China Plain’s 253 cubic meters per capita of available water is less than half of Egypt’s 570 cubic meters per capita in 2019, a year of severe water stress for the North African country. Keep in mind that Egypt does not have to maintain a large manufacturing base like China does.
Another problem with China’s water situation is that much of what it does have is undrinkable. A 2018 analysis from China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment found that, despite minor improvements, nearly 20 percent of China’s surface water is too contaminated to be consumed by humans.
Roughly seven percent of China’s available water is unfit for any use, scientists say.
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