To protect critically needed water from the long-cherished Yellow River from being further polluted, authorities are cracking down on polluters in the river's upper reaches.

The measures, taken to stop waste from draining into the river, will be taken amid a rising outcry over the deteriorating quality of the river's upper portions.

Gansu Province and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region held working conferences last week to improve regulations and other measures, local officials said.

Gansu officials will further reform management systems for sewage and improve standards for urban domestic pollution. It will also institute control measures for urban industries, sanitary sewage and rubbish pollution and solve the problem of grease being dumped in the main sewage pipes in Lanzhou, the provincial capital, said Zhao Weimin, director of the Gansu Provincial Environment Protection Bureau.

"We will further strengthen prevention and control of the pollution in the Yellow River, and strive to reach the State-made water quality standards in the river's Gansu section by the end of the 10th Five-Year Plan period (2001-05)," Zhao said.

The Inner Mongolia government has created an emergency plan to prevent water pollution accidents in the Yellow River's Inner Mongolian section, confirming the definite time to complete the infrastructure projects for the river's pollution controls and listed the polluting enterprises which need to be harnessed within a limited timeframe, according to local officials.

Industrial pollution is the chief culprit in the river's water pollution. And pollution by sanitary sewage, chemical fertilizer and pesticides are accomplices which need effective treatment, said a report on Yellow River pollution issued recently.

An expert group from the Water Resources Protection Bureau in the Yellow River Valley took an inspection tour early this year along the Yellow River and found water quality is too bad for drinking in some 40 percent of the sections of the river's master stream.

"With the region's rapid economic development, annual discharges of sewage into the Yellow River is one time more than that in the 1980s, reaching 4.4 billion cubic meters, and most of the tributaries in the upper reaches of the Yellow River are polluted in various degrees," said Chao Zengping, an official with the Yellow River Water Conservancy Committee.

And nearly all tributaries in the middle and lower reaches are suffering from bad water quality year round, and have been turned into sewage receivers, Chao said.

The Yellow River, the second longest river in China, is the life resources for China's northern regions. Its upper reaches, rising from northwest China's Qinghai Province, runs some 3,000 kilometers along Gansu Province, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

From Qinghai, passing Gansu, Ningxia, to Inner Mongolia, a number of high pollution industrial enterprises engaged in energy, heavy chemical industry, nonferrous metals, paper making along the river, send waste water into the river, much of it not properly treated, the official said.

Statistics from the Gansu Provincial Environment Protection Bureau show that Gansu sends 237 million tons of waste water into the Yellow River every year.

"The Yellow River flows through four cities in Gansu, but only the capital city Lanzhou has four sewage treatment plants at present, and their daily handling ability is only 150,000 tons.

"The sewage disposal fee charged can only maintain the operation of one sewage treatment plant with 100,000 tons of a daily-handling capacity," Zhao Weimin said.

Pollution has not only affected the industrial and agricultural production along the river's upper reaches, but has also jeopardized the safe drinking water for local people, and the environment along the river as a whole, the official said.

(China Daily September 27, 2004)