Think fantastic? No, my friends. Unfortunately, not fiction, but quite real news. A few years ago, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation proposed the idea of transferring 70 million cubic meters of water to China from the Altai Territory per year. For many years, the PRC has been offering good investments in exchange for transferring water to the Middle Kingdom. There the situation with fresh water is catastrophic. After they failed to build a plant for the extraction of fresh water on Lake Baikal for China, they returned to the old option: to turn Siberian rivers towards China and transfer water through Kazakhstan.
They plan to transfer water through Altai! This is my native land, where I was born and raised. Altai is called “the cradle of the world” for its virgin nature and unique ecosystem. Any attempt to change the "arteries" of rivers is like tearing off a vein that goes to the heart and redirecting it to the ass. Blood will go on, only a person will not live long! It's the same with nature: DO NOT CHANGE THE RIVER DIRECTION.
I will cite the sad experience that the Soviet Union practiced and practically destroyed the Aral Sea. Since the 1960s, the government decided that to irrigate the land in Central Asia (and then the USSR and the republics were still united), it was urgent to build irrigation canals. The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest in the world! Today there is only salt, a desolate bottom and a poisoned earth. Collector and drainage waters flowing from the fields into the river beds carried agricultural chemicals into the waters of the Aral Sea (more precisely, into what was left of it). Desert storms carry poisonous chemicals over a distance of over 500 km, poisoning everything around. In addition, in 2001, due to a drop in the water level, the island of Vozrozhdeniye was connected to the mainland, where there were laboratories for the development and testing of bacteriological weapons. The causative agents of anthrax, brucellosis, tularemia,plague, typhus and so on. Now there is a real danger that microorganisms that are deadly to humanity have survived in the soil on the island. Elementary infected rodents can spread all this across Central Asia and it will be extremely difficult to stop the consequences.
Now, not only are the forests of Russia being destroyed in colossal volumes, in the Far East and Siberia, Chinese "farmers" burn out the land with the most powerful chemistry, growing agricultural products … and Russia is overwhelmed by rallies against the garbage disaster, so also ideas come from the government like "let's finally destroy ecosystem of the country ". We really have a terrible ecological situation in the country. You just look around! The worst that a man could do is already on the threshold of our Motherland.
In China, problems with water will increase every year, and our authorities will be ready to do anything for "foreign investments". Sell Baikal and turn the rivers. While there is no detailed information, the project is at the stage of "deliberation", opinions differ. The Chinese company AQUASIB is still fighting for a plant on the shores of Lake Baikal for the extraction of fresh water. They clung to a death grip. Today they literally sent a material about the situation directly from the region to the mail! We are waiting for news. No information yet.
Author: Russian traveler, writer Pavel Pashkov