China’s Worst Flood In Decades Has Decimated Its Farmland

The flooding is due to a combination of factors; heavy rainfall thanks to El Niño has hammered the entire region for weeks, but it was a weather system now named Typhoon Nepartak that took the weather to the current destructive levels. The typhoon hit Taiwan on July 7th, then hammered mainland China on the 8th, causing even more heavy rainfall and huge wind speeds.

Dozens of rivers in 12 of China’s 23 provinces swelled and overflowed, most importantly the Yangtze. The area immediately surrounding these rivers comprises most of China’s most important cropland, a huge portion of which was either damaged or destroyed by the floods. It’s estimated that around 6.7 million acres of cropland was submerged. Reuters reported that millions of fowl were killed in only one small region; it’s not known exactly the extent of the damage, but it’s estimated to be in the range of $10 billion.

The Chinese government issued a release (thank you to Google Translate for the help on this one) noting that fruit and vegetable prices immediately “rose significantly” in the affected area, and that agents from various governmental agencies have been dispatched to attempt to attain some sort of price stability. Transportation has also been knocked out of whack, with thousands of buses, flights, and trains simply cancelled.

There’s still much to be revealed – we don’t know what’s going on with the annual grain harvest, for example – but nothing about this flooding has been encouraging so far.