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Water expo opens

By Sun Xiaohua (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-17 09:14

This year's Promotion Conference on International Advanced Water Technology would for the first time give the floor to buyers, rather than sellers, to declare their needs.

Attendees of the conference, which opens in Beijing today, include people from the Yellow River basin and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, as well as those working on reservoir maintenance and rural drinking water supply projects.

Also, more than 500 representatives from domestic research institutes and commercial enterprises, as well as those from countries such as the United States, Israel, Germany, Australia and Britain, would work to meet buyers' demands.

"Arranging the flow of communication in such a way makes the expo more effective and practical," said Cao Jinghua, deputy director of the science and technology promotion center under the Ministry of Water Resources, which has run the event since 2003. "And the buyers we invite are close to the water issues our country now faces."

For example, the Yellow River has for years been plagued by excessive bedload. Xinjiang faces a serious imbalance in water distribution but must provide large amounts of it to oil and gas industries, and large-scale cotton plantations. And because most of China's reservoirs were built about three decades ago, many are today high-risk operations. Also, many rural residents lack access to clean drinking water.

Vice-Minister of Water Resources Hu Siyi praised the expo as "one of the most important sources of technology".