Yellow River Unfit For Drinking Or Swimming For 3/4 Of Its Length

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BEIJING, May 25 (Reuters) - "Most of the Yellow River, the second-longest in China and the cradle of early Chinese civilisation, is so polluted it is not safe for drinking or swimming, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday. Nearly three-quarters of the river, which supplies water to 12 percent of China's 1.3 billion people and 15 percent of its farmland, had been badly tainted by sewage, industrial waste, fertiliser and other pollutants, it said.

"A government report said as much as 72.3 percent of the water in the Yellow River has dropped below the third category," the agency said, referring to a national water quality standard for drinking water, "breeding aquatics, fishery and swimming". (Ed. note - the lowest category is level five).

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"The water resources development and utilisation rate along the Yellow River valley is as high as 70 percent, much higher than the internationally recognised warning level of 40 percent," Xinhua said. That is a problem likely to only get worse when the river is tapped in China's ambitious South-North water diversion scheme, a plan to pump water from southern waterways to the parched north.

Nearly 45 billion cubic metres of water from the Yellow, Yangtze and other rivers will be sent north every year when the project is finished in 2050, at an estimated total cost of almost 500 billion yuan, twice that of the massive Three Gorges Dam. The national environmental protection agency has acknowledged that unless local governments and industries start getting serious about cutting pollution, most of the water shipped north will not be fit to drink. ($1=8.276 Yuan)."

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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/PEK278993.htm