China
is counting the cost. After another horrendous flood season,
countless earthquakes, droughts and a series of typhoons the
disaster toll in the world’s most populous nation has
again been crippling.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs has reported that in the first
nine months of this year alone more than 1,300 lives were lost
and 170 million people were affected. Direct economic losses
across the country, it says, amounted to almost US$ 11 billion.
The day after the ministry released those figures, it was recalculating.
A couple of million more people are now suffering from serious
drought in the south, over a million of them in Guangdong province
and over 1.4 million in neighbouring Guangxi autonomous region.
Many of them have insufficient drinking water but their livelihoods
are also affected. Many animals have been killed and several
hundred thousand hectares of farmland are reportedly parched
and cracking. Reservoirs have run dry and major ones in Guangdong
are said to have a billion cubic metres less than they did in
October last year.
Meanwhile, Guangxi’s western neighbour, Yunnan province,
had another earthquake this week with state media reporting
that 20,000 homes had collapsed.
There was no reported loss of life but it was something Yunnan
could do without. It was hit by a quake in August – the
third in one county in less than 12 months – which left
four people dead, nearly 600 injured and 126,000 homeless.
Yunnan, north China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region
and the northwest’s Qinghai province have all had earthquakes
measuring more than five on the Richter scale this year.
China is among the most disaster-prone countries on the planet
and catastrophe, it seems, is hitting ever harder. The summer
flood season in particular was a harsh reminder of the vulnerability
of the country’s rural poor to an unholy alliance of disaster,
poverty and gruesome threats to health.
Besides loss of life and livelihood, they face enormous health
hazards from poor sanitation and unsafe and unprotected water
supplies, particularly during flooding. Last summer, effluent
again washed from crude village latrines to contaminate surface
and ground water.
It doesn’t have to be that way, argues the Chinese Red
Cross. Natural hazards need not turn into natural disasters.
Groundbreaking work on reducing community vulnerability has
been ongoing since 2001. With support from the European Commission’s
Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), the Chinese Red Cross and the
International Federation have been working to turn the tide
by providing good sanitation, improved water supplies and health
and hygiene education where floods have hit hardest.
Now the Australian Red Cross and the Danish Red Cross are integrating
community-based disaster preparedness into the package. Australian
Michael Annear, the Federation’s programme coordinator,
explains: “We are going into communities which have been
devastated by floods and saying: Do you want to go through all
that again? If you don’t, we can help you do something
about it. The risks can be minimized.”
So far, the programme has been piloted in Guangxi and south-central
Hunan province, and in 2005 it will spread to the Chongqing
region which suffered terribly in this year’s late-summer
devastation of the southwest.
Annear, who designed the disaster preparedness component that
the Australian Red Cross began to introduce to Guangxi last
July, provides some perspective. “Despite the country’s
highly publicized economic development, China remains home to
nearly 20 per cent of the world’s poor,” he points
out. “Some 160 million people live on incomes of less
than one US dollar a day, and according to the Asian Development
Bank 203 million can be classified as extremely poor. When such
people are exposed to the consequences of natural disaster,
a major humanitarian challenge emerges.”
Most people severely affected by floods are struggling as subsistence
farmers. “That in itself is bad enough,” says Annear.
“They have no savings to help them recover. But then they
are also left facing disease.” Waterborne and sanitation-related
illness accounts for more than 70 per cent of infectious disease
in China.
Hygiene is dubious to start with, he says. Pigs, buffalo and
chickens may share the same housing space as people. The latrine,
if there is one, is often a simple pit with a couple of planks
placed across it.
Surveys have shown that almost 60 per cent of rural families
do not even have that, going instead to fields and open spaces.
The consequence, says Annear, is that diarrhoeal illness and
viral hepatitis - both associated with faecal pollution –
are the two leading infectious diseases in China.
“The faecal-oral route is the major means of transmission
which is why minimizing oral ingestion through improving personal
hygiene, or water and sanitation is of primary concern,”
he says.
The village of Shi Tang, in Hunan’s Lou Di prefecture,
a couple of hundred kilometres west of the provincial capital,
Changsha, saw diarrhoeal disease increase dramatically after
floods in both 2000 and 2001. “We had old traditional
latrines,” says village leader Liu Xu Weng, a farmer and
now Red Cross volunteer. “The whole environment was just
contaminated.”
It will not happen again. Since the Red Cross programme reached
Shi Tang, most of its 383 homes have acquired improved sanitation
and its population has received basic health education. It has
learnt how to better protect itself against disease both on
a daily basis and during flood seasons. Trained Red Cross volunteers
have gone house to house to impart new knowledge to them.
The change for the better does not just relate to cleanliness
in the home. Because the toilets, and the toilet areas, are
tiled, they are easy to keep clean but they have another advantage.
Farmers can go on doing what they have done for millennia –
using human waste as fertilizer – but doing it safely.
The Ecosan toilets the Red Cross provides separate urine from
faeces. Urine can be used directly as fertilizer because its
nitrate content replenishes nutrients in the soil, but solid
waste is stored in one of the toilet's two chambers for a period
of six months, neutralizing dangerous bacteria. Now the village
is looking to secure its water supply.
Some 24,800 families in poor rural communities of Hunan and
Guangxi have benefited so far from this vulnerability reduction.
But improved water and sanitation is only one way to decrease
the risks. Each community can assess and minimize the danger
of direct harm from natural hazards.
“The critical factor here is self-assessment, determining
the nature of potential disasters and where they will come from,”
says Michael Annear. “The community must ask itself how
it can get people out of harm’s way. It rapidly comes
to the conclusion that having a home on a flood plain or under
an unstable hillside isn’t a good idea. People are soon
making plans to plant trees on that hillside, to reduce rain
runoff and stabilize the soil with a strong root network. We
want communities developing their own, specific disaster preparedness
plans.”
The Australian warns that widespread community vulnerability
reduction programmes are essential if China’s appalling
losses to natural disaster are to be curtailed.
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Vulnerability
is greatest in China's impoverished villages (p12134)
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Something
to smile about: for thousands of poor rural families there
is better protection against disease, thanks to the Chinese
Red Cross (p12132)
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A
clean bill of health. But this woman remembers when floods
brought illness (p12130)
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Unsafe
water supplies and poor sanitation account for more than
70 per cent of infectious disease in China (p12131)
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Reducing
risks: village leader Liu Xu Weng, now a Red Cross volunteer,
goes house to house to increase community awareness (p12133)
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