Millions Without Drinking Water As China’s Largest Inland Lake Dries Up; Half of Country’s Rice Fields Affected, 80% of Fish Stocks Die in Hubei Province

By Malcolm Moore – “The volume of water in Poyang lake in Jiangxi province, normally 100 miles-long and 10 miles-wide, is now a tenth of its normal level, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.

Fishing boats and house boats have been left stranded on a vast stretch of the lake bed, now a lush grassland.

The drought, which has seen no rainfall for two months, has struck the central Chinese provinces that are known as the country’s ‘home of rice and fish’.

Almost half of all the country’s rice fields have been affected and four million people do not have access to drinking water.

At Honghu Lake, in Hubei province, fish farmers have seen 80 per cent of their stocks die. ‘More than 20,000 acres of fish farms have been severely damaged,’ said Zou Haibin, the local Communist party secretary in Dianhe, to Xinhua.” Read more.