China: Rising river, rising fears

By Andray Abrahamian

DANDONG, China - In China's hub for North Korean trade, the bang and clatter of preparation for transportation usually begins early, about 5 or 6 am. Once paperwork is finalized, the barriers go up and floods of trucks pour across the China-North Korea Friendship bridge in northeastern China into the Hermit Kingdom. Now, however, a deluge from the Yalu River is causing traders and local officials concern.

Flooding in Jilin province - upriver from Dandong - has strained the province's dam system. Trash has been swept into the rivers, blocking water flow, and some fear potentially disrupting the operation of the Yunfeng dam, which is currently at full capacity.

In order to alleviate pressure built up behind the dam, officials have chosen to release water. With the floods in Jilin unabating, the already swollen Yalu River now flows quickly and menacingly through the cities of Dandong and Sinuiju, a city across the river that is a part of the Sinuiju Special Administrative Region that was established in 2002 to experiment with introducing a market economy into parts of North Korea.

Preparation is evident up the river, into the countryside, with roads being blocked off and agricultural goods and workers moved to safety. The city of Dandong itself has a three-meter high floodwall and, using a system of sand and wooden planks, has barricaded all but the main road leading to the riverside.

About 100 meters of the city lie outside the barriers. Businesses and residences there are mostly closed and fortified with sandbags, including a North Korean restaurant famed for its music-making waitresses. Hotels have closed and the tourists that come to gawk at North Korea are now staring with just as much astonishment at the swollen river.

An evacuation order for areas outside the flood wall was expected for about 6 pm on Wednesday evening. By the evening, only one road was left open through the floodwall. Cars were still free to come and go, though few did, while thousands of pedestrians flocked to the riverfront park to enjoy the sunset and - for those whose employers are in front of the wall - an unexpected vacation.
By 6 am on Thursday morning that last road was blocked to vehicular traffic by police vans and heavy, lashing rains kept all but a couple of stubborn early birds away from the boardwalk, dots of color against the backdrop of grey skies and sandbagged, shuttered businesses. The police on duty said they didn't know when the last gate would go up - only that they still expected the water to rise and that they might be on alert for three or four days. Rain is forecast in Jilin for the rest of the week.

Should the waters rise, everyone hopes the floodwall will hold, but if it fails, the operations of trading companies will certainly be affected. Most are congregated just on the other side of the barriers. As Dandong-Sinuiju is the hub for China-North Korea trade, any disruption here will be felt in North Korea.

One Dandong-based trader worried that if the wall were breached, his stock - difficult to move in a hurry - could be destroyed. This in turn could cause cashflow problems, if too much was rendered unsellable. Compared to sanctions against trading with North Korea, this would be a bigger threat to his business. Sanctions just made things a little more complicated, he said. Pyongyang faces various sanctions over its nuclear weapons and other incidents, and possibly faces stiffer ones if it continues to avoid international discussions on the issue.

Evidence of South Korea's recent trade ban being circumvented was nearby: South Korean rice cookers, clothes and household utensils are on display at various trading companies. Some may be sold to Chinese consumers, but some are waiting to cross the border - unless North Korean storage facilities are damaged.

As usual, the situation on the other side of the river is the subject of dispute. Some long-time Dandong residents worried for their Korean counterparts, claiming that Sinuiju lies much lower than Dandong and that in the previous floods this area had seen - 15 years ago - came off much worse. Others, who had spent significant time in Sinuiju, claimed the city was higher than Dandong and was actually safer, though outlying neighborhoods and nearby villages were lower and at significant risk.

While North Korean and Chinese officials will have been in contact with each other, certainly, North Korea will likely have not had the same capacity to coordinate flood response as they have from Jilin province down to Dandong.

The damage in Jilin could also be a concern for North Korea in coming months. Some estimates are that rice output will drop 5-7%, putting inflationary pressure on worldwide rice markets. It could potentially affect China's ability to trade or send food aid.

This region is crucial to North Korea's economy. China is by far North Korea's biggest trading partner and the three Northeast provinces already make up 76% of China's trade with North Korea . Beijing is currently pushing ahead with a development plan which will link the northeast with North Korea as never before. From Beijing's perspective, if it can improve North Korea's economy, it helps aid the development and stability of a region that has lagged behind development on the East Coast.

Beijing has designated the cities of Dandong and Tonghua as hubs for wider special development areas. They will see significant investment in customs, storage and transportation facilities, as well as a duty-free zone. Pyongyang is also planning free economic zones to match the areas on the Chinese side of the border.

All this is being carried out even as Washington is maneuvering for tougher enforcement of United Nations sanctions passed in 2009. Right now, however, that is a distant concern for those who deal with cross-border commerce. As much as traders who deal with North Korea keep an eye on international relations, this summer, the imminent worry is the weather.

Andray Abrahamian is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ulsan, South Korea.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)


Russia: Heat also rises for parched Kremlin

By Khamida Gayfullina and Daisy Sindelar

ZAVYALOVO, Udmurt Republic - Farid Valitov, the head of a large farm in this Volga district republic, stands in the middle of a field filled with wilting stalks of feed corn.

Pulling one from the parched ground, he looks dejectedly at its stunted roots and says this summer's record-breaking heat wave will have dire consequences for his farm and livestock.

"There's nothing here. Rain wouldn't even help at this point. There won't be any food to feed the animals," says Valitov, who tends more than 800 cows and 1,700 other animals on his farm. "We're trying to find as much hay for them as we can. As of today, we're about 60% short on feed, so we'll have to cull almost half our livestock. It's going to be a hard winter. Our farm has already lost 41 million roubles [US$1.4 million]."

It's a familiar refrain throughout Russia and many of the former Soviet republics, where weeks of extreme weather - most notably heat and drought, but also flooding and windstorms - have killed crops and dramatically cut harvest forecasts.

Deadly blazes
In Russia, the unrelenting heat - with temperatures reaching as high as 39 degrees Celsius - has caused more immediate challenges. Most notably, it has sparked dozens of massive forest fires that have destroyed hundreds of houses and killed at least 34 people in a number of Russian regions, including the Moscow suburbs.

"There are nearly 150 fires a day," said Igor Vlaznev, the head of a firefighting unit in the Voronezh region some 500 kilometers south of Moscow, in an interview with Reuters. "All of them are caused by dry grass, dry forests. The fires spread through villages, farms, agricultural fields."

The Kremlin says the cost of fire damage could soar into the billions of rubles. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, consoling residents in the fire-ravaged Nizhny Novgorod region, has pledged to reconstruct all destroyed homes by winter.

But even if the government makes good on its promise to rebuild lost homes, it faces innumerable other challenges as a result of the hottest temperatures on record in 130 years.

Some 2,000 people have drowned this summer seeking respite from the oppressive temperatures. And growing numbers of people - many of them nursing-home residents or prisoners kept in stifling conditions - are reportedly dying as a result of the heat.

Russian officials have refused to release statistics on how many people may have died as a result of heat exhaustion, and journalists have reported being turned away from hospitals reluctant to discuss the human cost of the extreme weather.

The growing crisis - reminiscent of the 2003 heat wave in Western Europe, which caused the death of 15,000 mainly elderly people in France alone - may present the Kremlin with uncomfortable questions as the broader consequences of the heat wave become clear.

Grim harvest
There is also the looming reality that the country is facing one of the worst harvests in recent memory. Authorities have acknowledged that yields of the country's most significant crop, wheat, will drop dramatically this year. Russian grain producers have forecast a 20% drop in the nation's grain harvest, a dip that may force officials to cut back lucrative wheat exports by as much as half, from 18 million tons to 9.5 million.

The slimmed-down export forecasts for Russia - one of the world's biggest wheat exporters - have sent global wheat prices soaring and proved a boon for American wheat suppliers, prompting at least one disgruntled Russian academic to speculate that his country's heat wave had been masterminded by the Pentagon.

Indeed, some of the temperatures have been so extreme it's easy to see why conspiracy theories about Western climate-tampering could readily gain currency. Siberian outposts that have recorded some of the world's coldest temperatures are now experiencing protracted bouts of 32-degree weather. In the central Kirov region, temperatures have edged towards a baking 50 degrees. Farid Valitov says the drought will have dire consequences for his farm.

Mansur Nasipov heads the Kalinino agrofirm in the Kirov town of Malmyzh, says if things continue the way they are, "no one will be left alive" at the region's collective farms.

"Today the temperature here is 47 degrees," he said. "Everything has simply dried up. There's not a patch of green anywhere. Not a single gram of water is left in our well. In the morning it's possible to draw three or four buckets, but after that there's no water."

Price hikes?
A state of emergency has been declared in 23 regions because of the drought, with conservative estimates stating that the dry spell has already devastated nearly one-fifth of all farmland. The crisis has inevitably prompted fear of price hikes as grains for bread and feed grows scarce.

The Kremlin appears determined to fight off the bugbear of higher food prices and the political liability they represent. Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who heads a working group tasked with monitoring the consequences of drought, has confidently stated there will be no food shortage and that fears of price hikes have "no economic foundation."

But some are skeptical. "I think we can expect prices to go up," says Ruslan Grinberg, the director of the economic institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "It's clear that the authorities should always radiate optimism, and it's clear that the deputy prime minister belongs to the optimists' camp. Our citizens understand that if there's less of something - if grain yields go down - then it will get more expensive."

Lost exports
That fear of price hikes has spread to other wheat-growing countries in the region - notably Ukraine, where Prime Minister Mykola Azarov today said his country had sufficient grain reserves to prevent any rise in bread prices.

Ukrainian crops have been alternately battered by floods and drought during the summer months, and last year's wheat harvest of nearly 21 million tons could drop to 18 million or even lower.

Customs officials in Kyiv have imposed new controls on wheat exports in the face of the weak harvest, with international grain experts predicting Ukraine's wheat exports will dip from 9.3 million tons to 6.8 million. (Another of the region's major grain producers, Kazakhstan, will see a smaller drop from 7.8 million tons to 7 million.)

Ukrainian officials, however, remain bullish, with Agriculture Minister Mykola Prysyazhnyuk conceding that grain production has slowed but nonetheless offering an outsize prediction for the country's export volume, saying Ukraine would export "16 to 17 million tons" of grain this year.

New reality
The long-reaching consequences of the long, hot summer of 2010 have prompted speculation that Russia and its neighbors may be forced to acknowledge the growing issue of climate change, which so far has gained little political traction in the Kremlin or elsewhere.

Belarus has experienced its own volatile season of oppressive heat - with temperatures holding steady at 30-35 degrees - and fierce windstorms that left much of the country without electrical power. Like Ukraine and Russia, it is facing its own diminished harvest, with officials reporting failing potato, sugar beet, and corn crops because of the dry conditions.

The heat wave has been so intense it has forced authorities in Minsk to drop a ban on window air conditioners, which had been deemed too unsightly for the capital city.

Dzmitry Martsinkevich, an air-conditioner supplier, suggests authorities are accepting the fact there may be many hot summers to come.

"People are having a hard time. Food is going bad, the elderly are experiencing fainting spells," he says. Air conditioners, he adds, "are no longer a luxury but a necessity. The main thing is for these stores and businesses not to wait until summer - not to wait until the chocolate starts melting or the jars start popping. You have to be prepared."

RFE/RL's Belarus, Russian, Tatar-Bashkir and Ukrainian services contributed to this report.

Copyright (c) 2010, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036

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