Farmers kiss rice harvest goodbye

BEIJING - Severe drought is still haunting the rice-growing areas in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River despite recent rainfall and increasing releases of water from the Three Gorges Dam.

"My farmland was so dry I couldn't transplant rice seedlings into it," said Zhang Guozhou, a farmer in the Chengzi township in East China's Jiangxi province.

Zhang, who has 4.2 hectares of farmland in the township, made the remarks just weeks prior to the harvest of the early season rice.