a087  0601  13 Apr 77
PM-Peking-Drought, 190
    TOKYO (AP) - Even washing basins are being used to carry water to
the fields in the fight against drought in China's Shantung and Honan
provinces, a Peking broadcast said today.
    The two provinces have had little rain or snow since last fall, the
Hsinhua news agency said in a broadcast monitored here. But it said
three-fourths of the wheat fields in Shantung and 60 per cent in Honan
have been watered.
    More than 100 water conservation projects along the Yellow River
have been used to irrigate more than 2.47 million acres of wheat and
to prepare 815,450 acres for spring sowing of other crops, Hsinhua
said.
    In three drought-prone counties in Honan, it added, 300,000 commune
members have dug 1,000 water channels and 500 pump wells since last
winter.
    Earlier, Radio Canton reported that intensive efforts in battling
drought in Kwangtung Province in south China have saved 1.4 million
acres of fields. Owing to the severity of the drought, it said, the
province continued to mobilize the masses to ''crash transplant and
crash sow.''
    
0901aES 04-13
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n063  1306  09 Apr 77
 
BC-DROUGHT 1stadd
SAN FRANCISR THIS YEAR, Gordon Snow, special assistant to the director of
the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said that the
drought could cut farm production 20 to 40 per cent and cost farmers
as much as $3.5 billion.
    Later the department revised that estimate to between $700 million
and $2.1 billion, placing the most likely loss at $1.4 billion.
    But this week Snow, who is now working as a coordinator with the
governor's Drought Task Force, told the State Board of Food and
Agriculture that the ''most likely,'' loss could well be as low as
$1.2 billion from last year's gross agricultural income of $8.9
billion.
    Snow said he was revising his estimates because it had been
determined that 8,000 wells would be drilled in the Central valley
this year. ''That exceeded our projections,'' he said.
    He estimated that 140 million acre-feet of water lay beneath the
valley at depths that could be tapped by wells. That is more than
three and a half times the amount used annually in the state and
about four times the total storage capacity of all the reservoirs in
California.
    However, he also predicted that 59,000 agricultural jobs would be
lost this year, most of them at harvest time. Ordinarily there are
about 320,000 agriculture-related jobs each season.
    Explaining his shift to a somewhat more optimistic position, Snow
noted that in a normal year, even without the new wells now being put
in, ''more water comes out of the wells than reservoirs - just a tad
more'' for irrigation.
    Snow also said that it appeared now, according to power company
estimates, that there would be enough electricity to pump the needed
water from the wells.
    But he hastened to add:
    ''We're not clear over on the optimistic scale. It's not as bad as
we thought, but it's still terrible.''
    As for what would happen if the drought continues another year, he
said:
    ''If it happens next year - if it really happens - the cities will
be in serious trouble before agriculture. And if that happens some of
the water normally used by agriculture will be diverted to them. When
it comes to people versus agriculture, people win every time. But
cities don't use that much water. We'll divert and dig some more
wells.''
    
0409 1601pes
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