Hu calls on coal mines, ports to safeguard supplies

BEIJING—Chinese President Hu Jintao on Thursday urged the safeguarding of the production and transport of coal for power generation, in light of the severe weather affecting much of the country.
Hu spoke during an inspection of coalfields in Datong, Shanxi Province and Qinhuangdao Port, through which much of Shanxi’s coal is shipped. Power in much of central and southern China has been disrupted by the winter weather and its ensuing effects on coal transport.
As of Sunday, 17 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions had suffered blackouts, and power grids in central Hubei and Hunan provinces and southern Guizhou and Guangdong provinces had been seriously damaged. The blackouts shut down electrified railways in those areas as well.
More than 30 million people have been affected by the power shortages, many of them stranded en route home for Spring Festival family reunions. The snow, the heaviest in a decade in many places, has been falling in China’s east, central and southern regions since Jan. 10, causing deaths, structural collapses, blackouts, highway closures and crop destruction.
The Chinese government has vowed to ensure a steady supply of farm produce, which has been threatened by the heavy snow that has fallen since mid-January, the worst in five decades. Supply shortages are causing another round of price rises for agriculture products, for instance those which make up essential daily food.
Southern regions where farmers grow crops over winter were stricken severely by the bad weather, said a leading agricultural policy decision maker Chen Xiwen on Thursday. “The blow was especially hard on vegetable production, which was ruinous in some places,” he said.
The snow hit 105 million mu (7 million hectares) of farmland, mainly in the middle and downstream Yangtze River, and crops were entirely destroyed on 11.3 million mu, according to the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA). Cole and other vegetables, oranges and wheat were especially hard hit.
Dairy and meat supplies were under pressure from the cold as well as shortages of animal feed and water. Some 874,000 pigs, 85,000 cattle, 459,000 sheep and 14.4 million poultry had died, according to Chen Weisheng, who is in charge of husbandry with MOA. Tight supplies were exacerbated by shipping disruptions caused by the unrelenting snow and sleet over much of China. Premier Wen Jiabao vowed to ensure the transportation of daily necessities.
In order to protect agriculture, which is “still the weakest link” in national economy, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the State Council, or China’s cabinet, jointly issued the first document of this year. One of its aims was to ensure stable prices of agriculture products, which would prevent China from slipping deeper into the predicament of high-flying inflation.
Since food has a weighting of 32.74 percent in the CPI, the stable supply of such commodities, farm produce in particular, will be a decisive factor behind China’s efforts to curb inflation.
The public has started to feel the pressure as vegetable prices escalated across the country. In Changsha, Wuhan and other hard-hit cities in the southern, central and eastern regions, vegetable prices have more than doubled. Areas not affected by snow, such as Beijing and the southern Guangdong province, have also seen price rises.
“Greenhouse vegetables sold in Beijing relies relatively on transport from the south. There were more than 10 trucks with a load of 20 tons before, now there’s only one or two coming because of the snow. When a truck comes, we all swarm to it however high the price is,” said Huang Tianlu, a 45-year-old wholesaler at Xinfadi market, the largest farm produce market in Beijing. Zhuang Jian, senior economist with the Asian Development Bank mission in China, said rising prices, forced up because of supply disruption caused by the rare snowstorms, would definitely affect the inflation rate.—Xinhua