Constant rainstorms hit southern China this month, causing direct economic losses of 9.67 billion yuan ($1.46 billion) and damaging 575,800 hectares of crops. But analysts said the agricultural losses won't have much of an effect on domestic food prices because the government has ample grain reserves. Still, many villagers have lost their livelihood, so disaster relief agencies are doing their best to help, promising reasonable subsidies once the disaster comes to an end.

Residents wade through a flooded street on Friday in Luzhou, Southwest China's Sichuan Province. Photo: CFP

Over the past month, parts of Liping county in Southwest China's Guizhou Province got drenched with the most rainfall they have seen since 1956, local media reported.

In the worst-hit parts of the county that day, 373.4 millimeters of rain fell over the 24-hour period starting on June 9, local news portal gog.cn reported on June 12.

It didn't take long for the deluge to ravage entire villages.

"After six hours of storms, all the farmland, streets and houses in the village were flooded," one villager in the county told the Global Times on Wednesday.

A villager surnamed Yang, who farms a 0.3-hectare plot, has given up on this season's harvest, which usually yields 2,500 kilograms of rice.

"There will be no harvest after such severe flooding. What's worse, the sowing season has passed," he said.

Continuous rainstorms and flooding in June have taken a tremendous toll on the people of Guizhou and other parts of southern China.

In Guizhou alone, 503,800 people have been affected by the storms, according to data released by the Civil Affairs Bureau of Guizhou Province on Thursday.

About 9,000 houses and 19,568 hectares of crops have been damaged by the storms.

The bureau estimated that the province has suffered 775 million yuan($117.18) in losses from the flooding.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs reported Wednesday that the storms and flooding have impacted an estimated 8.8 million people in 10 provinces, including East China's Jiangxi Province as well as Central China's Hubei Province.

As of 9 am on Wednesday in China, more than 6,800 houses had collapsed, another 42,000 had suffered some degree of damage and 575,800 hectares of farmland had been damaged, including 55,000 hectares of crops that had been destroyed, according to the ministry's report.

Direct economic losses from the storms hit 9.67 billion yuan.

Some parts of East China's Anhui, Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces, as well as other areas, will continue to see rainstorms this week, the National Meteorological Center reported at 6 pm on Saturday.

Stable prices

Although the rainstorms have damaged a large quantity of crops in southern China, it is unlikely to cause food prices to spike because the country has sufficient reserves, analysts noted.

The ongoing rainstorms in southern China will only have a slight influence on grain prices, said Xu Gao, chief economist at China Everbright Securities Co.

"The government can hold down grain prices because it has great reserves of wheat, rice and corn," Xu said on Friday.

China's corn reserves total 250 million tons, among the highest in the world, cankaoxiaoxi.com reported on May 29, citing the Financial Times.

Crop output of China has been stable for years. It was 620 million tons in 2015, taking into account floods and droughts, said Ma Wenfeng, a senior analyst at Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant.

"I predict that crop output is unlikely to fall too much - maybe 1 percent to 2 percent at the most - because the regions affected by the storms account for just more than 0.5 percent of the country's overall grain-growing acreage," Ma told the Global Times on Wednesday.

China had 1.13 trillion hectares of grain-growing acreage in 2015, up 0.6 percent year-on-year, according to a report released by the National Bureau of Statistics in February.

Although Ma doesn't see any lasting rise in food prices, he said fruit and vegetable prices may spike in the short term due to "traffic inconvenience," which might cause an increase in the country's consumer price index (CPI), the main gauge of inflation.

Nonetheless, the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, has the tools to keep inflation in check, Ma said.

The CPI might spike if crop output tumbles by more than expected in October, the harvest season, Ma noted.

After the disaster

In the wake of the flooding, local emergency management agencies have adopted measures to aid the victims of the disaster.

"The government has made every effort to help people affected by the flooding. For example, it has provided relief supplies, emergency funds and working teams," a staff member surnamed Yang from the Guizhou Province Emergency Department told the Global Times on Friday.

A total of 11 million yuan in emergency funding has been distributed to severely afflicted regions and eight working teams have been dispatched to aid in the rescue.

In addition, relief supplies including 3,700 tents, 27,000 quilts as well as 4,000 pieces of clothes have been distributed to disaster areas, according to a report on Thursday on the website of the Guizhou Province Department of Civil Affairs.

However, it is hard to see how the residents in the flooded areas will make ends meet.

The villager from Liping county had made a living by selling Chinese yew saplings, but the flooding destroyed 2,000 saplings he had planted. It also washed away his minivan. "I may have to do odd jobs to make money," the villager said.

Another villager surnamed Li from Poyang county in East China's Jiangxi Province said his fruit shop didn't escape the effect of the flooding.

"What's disastrous is that no customers have come to buy fruits because of the storms, so I can do nothing but watch my fruits rot," he said.

The government will distribute subsidies to the victims of the flooding, local agricultural departments said. The amount of the subsidies will depend on how much each victim has lost.

When contacted by the Global Times on Thursday, the Department of Agriculture of Tongren, a city in Guizhou, said it was discussing subsidies, but refused to give more details.

"We are now fighting against floods, and the government will surely provide subsidies to victims according to their losses," an official from the Department of Agriculture of Hubei Province told the Global Times on Friday in a telephone interview.

The State Administration of Grain also said they hadn't decided on the relevant subsidy policies when contacted by the Global Times on Thursday.
Newspaper headline: Ravaged by rain