China is being ravaged by floods and food crisis that seems to be going out of control. However, the country is trying to curtail the grimness of the dual crisis.

It is home to 1.4 billion people, but it is far from self-reliant. It imports 20 per cent to 30 per cent of its food grains.

China was the world’s top agricultural market between 2003 and 2017, its food imports have grown from $14 billion to $105 billion from the top-10 import partners alone, China imports food worth $75.3 billion.

The country’s crops have been wiped out by the mass flooding and, as a result, food prices are on the rise. 

Also read: Amid pandemic, China stares at food crisis

The Chinese military plans to introduce robot cooks and high-efficiency energy-saving stoves to reduce labour intensity even as it launched a drive to stop food waste and cultivate thrifty habits in the defence forces under the “clean plate” campaign launched by President Xi Jinping.

Floods on the upper reaches of China’s Yangtze river forced authorities to evacuate more than 100,000 people on Tuesday and threatened a 1,200-year-old world heritage site.

Also see: China’s Yangtze river overflows leaving 100,000 and a heritage site affected!

Staff, police and volunteers used sandbags to try to protect the 71-metre Leshan Giant Buddha, a UNESCO World Heritage site in southwestern Sichuan province, as muddy flood water rose over its toes for the first time since 1949, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Sichuan, through which the Yangtze river flows, raised its emergency response to the maximum level on Tuesday to cope with a new round of torrential rainfall.

The Yangtze Water Resources Commission, the government body that oversees the river, declared a red alert late on Tuesday, saying water at some monitoring stations was expected to exceed “guaranteed” flood protection levels by over 5 metres.

Water levels at China’s giant Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river are inching closer to their maximum after torrential rains raised inflows to a record high, official data showed on Friday.

With 75,000 cubic metres per second of water flowing in from the Yangtze river on Thursday, the reservoir’s depths reached 165.6 metres by Friday morning, up more than 2 metres overnight and almost 20 metres higher than the official warning level.

The Three Gorges Project, a massive hydroelectric facility was designed in to tame floods on the Yangtze river.

The project restricts the amount of water flowing downstream by storing it in its reservoir, which has been over 10 metres higher than its official warning level for more than a month.

The facility was forced to raise water discharge volumes on Tuesday in order to “reduce flood control pressures”, the water ministry said.

Authorities have been at pains to show that the cascade of giant dams and reservoirs built along the Yangtze’s upper reaches have shielded the region from the worst of the floods this year, though critics say they might be making things worse.