The Number 1 Document of 2011, jointly issued by the Chinese Communist Party and State Council on the eve of the Chinese New Year correctly addresses what has been a fundamental problem in Chinese economic development which has left the agricultural sector behind and out of balance with the rest of the economy.  While many aspects of agriculture have leapt ahead, including seed strain quality, fertilizers and insect and weed control, farm mechanization, and especially efficient marketing, one thorny aspect was neglected, and even overlooked.  This is the distribution of water from main sources such as rivers and dams to the actual farm plots.  In retrospect the cause of neglect is recognizable.

For decades after the founding of modern China, farmland was organized by planners who, while in theory were well intentioned and had an overview of strategies, in practice often failed badly in oversight of details that only individuals close to the action can observe, understand and effectively respond to.  It was only the Responsibility System, pioneered around 1980 that unleashed the productive power of individual farm households.  Farmers adjudged the market, planted accordingly and tended their crops diligently.  Fertilizer application and pest/weed control were conducted with intricate consideration. Land leveling and tilling practices suited requirements.  Even sunshine and warmth could be harnessed with greenhouses for vegetables and nurturing the seedlings in the upper latitudes.  The one thing farmers had little control over was inputs to their farming culture of water. The two main sources were from the sky, or from ditches that has been dug long ago according to past agricultural regimen. If they existed and could be cost-benefitted, wells with powered pumps were the only on-site source a farmer might regulate. Thus water, as the lifeblood of the produce farmers relied on, was an external, peripheral input to farms and to farmers lives.

Ironically, China has for thousand of years treated the good management of water as a manifestation of the Mandate of Heaven.  Emperors who controlled floods and who alleviated drought effects withefficient water supply were admired, and failure to do so, leading to calamities, was a comment on leadership.  In the third century BC, a major engineering project brilliantly planned and implemented on the longest tributary of the Yangtze River turned 5,000square kilometers of dry farmland into rice paddies and a prime rice production base.  Governor Li Bin, the leader of the project, was subsequently revered as a god, and his statue and legends about him abound.  Modern day Chinese water engineers may model their life after him, competing to build grand schemes. Dam building in new China seems an unmitigated obsession, culminating in the world’s largest engineering project, The Three Gorges, and now eclipsed in scale of water management by the South-North Water Transfer project.  China needs macro-strategic planning of water management and allocation, and needs world class water engineers.  When the Sichuan earthquake struck in May 2008, even beyond the 70,000 deaths, there was a much greater danger of the “quake lakes” breaking and flooding downstream where millions lived.  It was the water engineers who helicoptered in dozens of bulldozers to the instant and accidental landslide dams to abate huge buildups of water pressure and volume.  The water engineers were heroes.

At the other end of the chain of water usage are the farmers, averaging a few mu per household, who desperately hope for access to water from ditches beside their paddocks.  The science and art of applying the right amount of water at the right time to each plant for best results is highly complex.  In water-scarce Xinjiang,Aksu Prefecture, the agricultural department of WensuCounty displays posters of the planting season for their famous rice crop, with an irregular sawtooth chart showing 16 interventions on managing paddy water level from 0 to 8 cm. This is merely the ideal for the county, and each astute farmer knows that for his plot, for each paddy square, there are idiosyncrasies in water requirements.  Clifford Geertz, in his 1964 seminal work, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia observed that increases in population meant increased activity and attention to tending the water levels of paddies, so that increased yields were directly related to increased population.  Joe Rickman at the International Rice Research Institute has a disarming response to questions about his proven results that better water management can double yields: Guaranteed application of the right amounts of water at the right time lead to farmer confidence in high quality investment in all inputs, and in labor, so that a 20% yield improvement directly attributable to better water control is the foundation for a 100% increase from all properly delivered inputs. The corollary is, why buy the best of any inputs and waste time too, when the water input is unreliable?

In the supply chain of running water, from natural rivers and man-made dams, down to the lifeblood at the roots of each farmed plant, there has been a serious gap in planning, and even in the consciousness of planners.  At the high profile upstream end of a giant project, engineers talk of fifty thousand cubic meters water flow per second. And at the vital final downstream end, farmer Lao Bai Xing is hoping he can get 10 cubic meters per mu onto his crop spread over certain days critical to growth.  And it is the farmer, and the value he adds to production that is counted in GDP.  The disconnect between megaproject and the lowly farmer is now becoming obvious and better understood.  The most obvious reasons are that water flows naturally downhill, that ditches are easy to dig with simple tools, and the pattern has evolved to be workable over hundreds or more years.  A more unpalatable reason is that there are always rivalries in water allocation, and optimal allocation requires a broad view, even a whole watershed, and it may be intersected by administrative boundaries where communication is inadvertently or deliberately not well managed.

The assumption that science and a comprehensive perspective are not needed to get water from primary sources to tertiary reticulation has left agriculture increasingly deprived of potential.  The vital secondary phase, between when waterways of 100 meters wide are subdivided to paddock inlets 10 centimeters wide has been neglected.  People of vision and of the right engineering and technical skills are not attracted, and certainly the budgets have not been there.  From the prefecture to county to shire to village, it has often been the least well trained left to maintain old ditches.  New works may have primitive surveying layouts, and the only option above manual labor may be an excavating machine following pegs that were laid out with no broad plan.

Starting 2011, this will all change. The highest level of leadership in China have initiated a plan to spend 4,000,000,000,000 yuan over ten years essentially aimed at this secondary tier of water allocation, specifically mentioning medium and small rivers, and improved services to irrigated land.  The UpperDanubeRiver in Germany is subject to a comprehensive management plan, and channels delivering water in and drains taking water away have been laid out from a holistic viewpoint.  Stakeholders, with farmers as the dominant force, have access to computerized data, and joint optimum decisions are made on water allocation. The forecasts of water likely to be available during the growing season are a factor in deciding what to plant.

Australia provides good models of modern second level water delivery systems that greatly benefit farmers and turn dry regions into food bowls.  Stemming from a primary engineering feat of capturing good rainfall from the Pacific Ocean side of the Great Dividing Range and tunneling through to the dry western slopes, the state of Victoria conscientiously constructed a comprehensive hierarchical network of channels to feed water to millions of hectares of farmland.

A prolonged drought affecting much of eastern Australia began in the late 1990s and led state and federal governments to develop a number of policy responses to mitigate its effects. Among them was a significant investment in the modernization of the country’s irrigation water delivery systems in order to improve their efficiency and reduce the massive amounts of water lost in transit from dams to farms.

The need for efficiency and the knowledge of the importance of timing and quick response drove the evolution of a high-tech scientific system that includes electronic water gates with in-built metering and management software and solar panels to power them, wireless communications for pan-network control and a computerized management system centrally controlled that can supply water in an hour instead of 4 days before modernization.  The rapid change from rambling ditches to a modern scientific integrated system was facilitated by former state government engineers who were first to see the need for change and established a private company to drive research and development.  David Aughton led a team of senior staff from the state water utility to found Rubicon Water and implement a new world-leading technology, Total Channel Control, across  a number of major irrigation districts, including the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District -Australia’s largest, with over 6,000 km of channels. Aughton summed up the change: “The drought in Australia has seen the price of irrigation water increase 50-fold in just 10 years and now investing in efficiency makes strong economic and environmental sense.”  Rubicon is now working closely with China’s Ministry of Water Resources and has four pilot projects in the provinces and set to work with local authorities for more. Rubicon CEO Bruce Rodgerson added, “Our Total Channel Control technology will increase the prosperity of farmers in China by increasing yields and enabling them to diversify into higher value crops simply by making sure the water is at the farm when the farmer decides, when the crop needs it.”

Other country initiatives to modernize channel systems include the dry westerns states in the US and Israel. Yet no other country matches Australia as a model, with the Americans surprisingly lagging in integrated computerized channel management, and the Israelis driven by their harsh climate and security concerns supported by wealth to concentrate on piping water rather than the natural, much cheaper open channelling.

As the Twelfth Five Year Plan unfolds, and with the first half of this niche sectoral initiative for ten years nested within it, critical attention must be paid to how the 4 trillion yuan is allocated.  The beneficiaries targeted by State Council and the Chinese Communist Party in their No 1 Document are farmers demanding precise responses of water supplied by amount and on time.  That cannot be achieved by existing local authorities simply doubling up current practices with “more of the same” adhoc ditches.  Possibly neither the local arms specifically responsible for water or for agriculture have the capability, vision, or executive powers to revolutionize broad scale channel delivery of water from primary sources to the farmer’s plot.  It will take an overview, perhaps of the scope of the National Development and Reform Commission to coordinate basin management and plan totally new scientific development perspective to this critical, until now neglected, sector of the economy.