Chinese military tackles drought crisis

Posted by John Malloy on 02/09/2009

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The Chinese government brought out the big guns over the weekend to help fight its worst drought in 50 years.

Soldiers loaded rockets with cloud-seeding chemicals over the weekend and fired them into the sky over drought-stricken areas.

The clouds opened and it rained briefly in some of the hardest hit provinces in northern and central China, but not enough end to the drought. The clouds were too thin and moving too fast to do much good.

In the longer term China plans to divert water from its two longest rivers to drought-stricken areas, although it will remain difficult to get water to mountainous and remote farmland. Many farms in China still rely on rainfall, because irrigation systems are poor.

Some places are getting 80 percent less rain than they normally do, according to the Flood Control and Drought Relief Office.

Since November, northern and central China has had little precipitation. Many places have not had rainfall for more than 100 days…

www.cnn.com

Posted by John Malloy on 02/09/2009. Filed under International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry