Drought has affected more than 1 million people and several million animals in Guangdong Province.

In some rural areas, people even do not have enough drinking water, according to an official from the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Water Conservation Tuesday.

Many domestic animals were reported to have been killed after local reservoirs ran dry in the eastern, western and northern parts of the prosperous province, the official said.

More than 472,630 hectares of farmland in the province have been seriously affected by the drought, the official said.

And 125,100 hectares of farmland is without any water at all, the official added.

In Shaoguan alone, a city in the northern part of Guangdong, more than 240,000 residents have had insufficient drinking water supplies since the beginning of the month.

The total economic losses caused by drought in Shaoguan come to more than 136 million yuan (US$16.5 million).

The Shaoguan city government has, to date, invested more than 18 million yuan (US$2.19 million) to help fight the disaster.

Other cities that have been hardest hit by drought include Jieyang, Yunfu, Zhaoqing, Meizhou and Chaozhou in Guangdong's mountainous areas.

The southern Chinese province which is usually hit by floods has been threatened by severe drought since autumn, the official told China Daily.

"This year, Guangdong is experiencing one of its four most serious droughts since 1961," the official said.

This year, water reserves in the province's 28 large reservoirs has only reached 5.29 billion cubic meters, a reduction of 1.08 billion cubic meters from the previous year.

And many small and medium sized reservoirs have run dry since autumn, the official said.

The cities of Guangzhou, the provincial capital, Zhuhai, Huizhou and Qingyuan in the Pearl River Delta, have also experienced water shortages because of the drought.

In Conghua and Zengcheng, the two suburban cities of Guangzhou, more than 50,000 hectares of rice has been affected.

More than 40 percent of all rice growing areas in Guangzhou have suffered from the water shortages.

To help combat the situation, the Guangzhou municipal government has shut down all the city's small and medium sized hydraulic power stations to ensure agricultural irrigation.

The provincial government is now planning to increase artificial rains to fight the drought later this year.

The province precipitated rain 137 times between March 25 and September 22 this year, adding an extra 1.4 billion cubic meters of rainfall to ease pressure on the province's reservoirs.

Yu Yong, director of the Guangdong Provincial Observatory, has attributed this year's unstable weather that has caused less rainfall and a summer heatwave to the worsening drought in Guangdong which is expected to last till spring.

Drought-stricken cities and counties have been urged to take concrete and effective measures to reduce economic losses to a minimum.

Yu urged water conservation departments to help ease the effects of the drought and put available water to rational use.

South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region which borders Guangdong is also suffering from drought this year.

More than 1.4 million people in 74 cities, prefectures and counties in the region have been affected, with many of them having insufficient drinking water supplies.

More than 67,000 hectares of crop land have also suffered.

The average rainfall in Guangxi reached 207 millimeters in August and September, a reduction of 45 percent from the corresponding months of the previous year.

(China Daily October 20, 2004)