NGO helps farmers battle drought
By Zhang Zixuan and Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-26 09:52
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His throat is dry and his feet hurt - every day.
That's life for Gao Zhonghua ever since the most devastating drought in a century struck Guizhou province.
The 30-year-old farmer, in Changshun county's Jiaoma village, now makes a three hour trek two or three times a day to retrieve water from a shrinking stream. He can carry enough for his family of six to drink and cook. And that's about it.
"Doing laundry and bathing have become luxuries," Gao says. "We had to sell off some of our larger livestock, like cattle, because they drank too much."
In addition to losing his animals, his fields are too dry to till, let alone sow, he says. "If this weather keeps up, our water source will eventually dry up. I'll have to leave home and find a living somewhere else."
His family might have already moved on if not for assistance from the NGO Oxfam Hong Kong.
On March 9, the nonprofit organization gave him buckets and a 40-yuan subsidy for transporting water.
"I'm sure the government and us farmers would find some way to pull through even without the help. But Oxfam lightened our burden and gave us faith," Gao says.
About 1.07 million yuan ($156,600) of the 5.55 million yuan the NGO has spent on drought relief in Southwest China went to Guizhou, where it assisted 12,833 people. The rest went to Yunnan province and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the NGO says.
Working with the local governments, Oxfam identified Guizhou's four poorest and most severely affected counties - Changshun, Pu'an, Dushan and Weimin. It then researched and distributed what was most needed in each of the different locations.
In Changshun, where Gao lives, the organization invested 300,000 yuan ($43,900) to provide 1,400 plastic buckets with a 1.5-yuan subsidy for every container in March. It also supplied six tons of rice, enough to feed 4,000 people for up to two months.
"The drought's not like a flood or an earthquake. The public and relevant bodies usually pay less attention to long-term crises than instantaneous disasters," Oxfam's Guiyang office project manager Zhao Yongzhu says. "So they have less experience with handling such problems and knowing how to respond."
Consequently, current solutions tend to be short-term answers to long-term problems, he says.
It has never been easy for Luodian county's Dongdang village residents to get enough water, says 73-year-old farmer Luo Jinzhou. The drought destroyed the entire village's wheat harvest. Even if it were to rain now, residents couldn't harvest until September.
Oxfam gave Luo's family five 75 kg of rice on April 15. "My wife and I are old and can't earn money to feed our grandsons without farming," Luo says. "But with the allowance from the government and help from Oxfam, I'm satisfied."
Gao says the drought made him realize what people in his situation need in the long run. "I hope there will be more water supply facilities that can store and transport more water from other places," he says. "And we as farmers need to find more ways to increase our incomes so we're more capable of coping with such disasters."
Then, he believes, aching feet and parched lips might become something he'll never have to endure again.