Interesting - I didn’t know that. You’d think they’d take the hint and make their own arrangements instead of just moaning about it. It’s not the government’s job to subsidize their lack of business sense, or to fix the weather for them.
Seems to be just human nature to pretend bad stuff isn’t happening until it’s way, way too late.
[quote=“hannes”][quote=“finley”]We get water rationing on-and-off most years, no? This one does sound pretty drastic though.
It’s depressing that nobody ever mentions the possibility of water-use efficiency. It’s as if people don’t even know such a thing is possible. I suspect (as in most countries) the water is actually being used by agriculture and industry, not domestic supply. The water-rationing is therefore a pointless gesture. Bet farmers won’t see their irrigation channels shut down (and thereby forced to use modern methods of water conservation).[/quote]
I remember seeing in the news (a few months ago, can’t remember when and where) that farmers where complaining about irrigation water supply being cut off, leaving with no water to cultivate their crops. So it does happen.[/quote]
Down south there has been contention of who gets priority , farmers or industry. As Finley said they both waste vast amounts of water.
[quote=“Abacus”][quote=“jesus80”][quote=“Abacus”]
I think this is part of the problem. Everyone is just saying that the rainy season is coming so the problem will go away.[/quote]
May be you made a point, but I never heard anybody saying that for justifying anything. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that people do that. However, as others point out, we hear about water shortage perhaps every year (although here it-s way more rainy than in my country!).
Also the problem is not people saying “hey, we have the rainy season around the corner”, it’s most likely that people had always plenty of water and may be that’s about to change… in addition to overpopulation.[/quote]
You just said that you didn’t know how necessary the water cuts were since the rainy was just around the corner. The problem is not the reservoirs or the lack of rain. It’s that people aren’t aware that it can actually be a problem since it is a very rainy country (for 6 months). In addition to that by far the biggest users are agriculture and industry as finley mentions. One of the reasons they consume so much is that water is so cheap here. It’s the same problem with electricity. If you want to see conservation then raise the prices because as long as something is cheap people are going to use it like an unlimited resource.
Did anybody read the recent article that there might be rolling blackouts in the future because there isn’t enough power? Taiwan’s management of utilities sucks.[/quote]
It’s NOT very rainy in some parts ie South and Central west coast.
The problem is no new major reservoirs are going to be built and the current ones are all silting up faster than antcipated, a super typhoon can shorten the life of the reservoir by many years,. Basically there is a design flaw with the dams as they can’t remove the silt by washing it out.
Now typhoons are anticipated to dump more water (even if rainfall overall becomes less frequent). This is because the oceans are warming up, warmer oceans put more energy into typhoons.
[quote=“Abacus”]
You just said that you didn’t know how necessary the water cuts were since the rainy was just around the corner. The problem is not the reservoirs or the lack of rain. It’s that people aren’t aware that it can actually be a problem since it is a very rainy country (for 6 months). In addition to that by far the biggest users are agriculture and industry as finley mentions. One of the reasons they consume so much is that water is so cheap here. It’s the same problem with electricity. If you want to see conservation then raise the prices because as long as something is cheap people are going to use it like an unlimited resource.
Did anybody read the recent article that there might be rolling blackouts in the future because there isn’t enough power? Taiwan’s management of utilities sucks.[/quote]
You got me wrong. I’m not saying that you can use all the water you want because the rainy season is around the corner. I’m expressing my surprise that this measure needs to be taken just now, which is not far from the rainy season (IIRC). I also don’t know how dramatic the situation is. I agree that water price can be also a problem. May be the solution to the crops consuming too much water is governments intervention: you have this crop of this extension for this type of farming? ok, the max. amount of water you can use is X".
Interesting - I didn’t know that. You’d think they’d take the hint and make their own arrangements instead of just moaning about it. It’s not the government’s job to subsidize their lack of business sense, or to fix the weather for them.
Seems to be just human nature to pretend bad stuff isn’t happening until it’s way, way too late.[/quote]
Also Hsinchu Science Park and related industries have had rationing, so they have come up with an alliance to save water. Problem is that there is a minimum as per cutrrent standards, and I think they can handle like 7% while the government wants 10% or something like that.
The Government’s position is that they cannot control the weather. End of discussion, don’t ask questions.
For starters, enforcement of anti deforestation measures in the mountainous areas surrounding the reservoirs would help a lot in reducing the silt washed down by the normal rain, let alone the monster storms we have been getting … and will get even worse. With climate change dumping the amount of rain of one year in 3 days -as in Morakot- we can expect the rainfall amounts will get brutal… and so will be the silt washed off. The life expectancy of the reservoirs will be shortened faster than current calculations.
What I mean to say is that the rainy season will bring no respite, just the opposite. And the problem will get even worse every year, drought or no drought.
This sort of intervention gets really ugly, mainly because governments generally are 30 years behind the curve. I know someone in the UK who runs a modern organic farm but has to register everything she does with it - what is being planted and where - as if they were using the standard monocrop method. Organic planting just doesn’t work like that, so she basically has to make up some bullshit to conform with what the government thinks a farmer does. Giving every farmer X liters of water for crop Y, based on what the government thinks crop Y needs, leaves no incentive for innovation.
Far better, surely, to just have farmers pay for the water they use (other than rainwater that falls onto their farm, of course). Extraction from waterways, for whatever reason, should be metered and billed as public property. In countries like Taiwan - which receive a lot of rainfall on average - there is absolutely no need for a farmer to use external sources of water. Some sort of local short-term storage would be advisable, but that need not be more than a few cubic meters per hectare to avoid water stress during the (short) dry seasons, during which the farmers ought to be growing only appropriate crops (with low water demands) in the first place.
Don’t fear … tomb sweeping day is around the corner, raining it will do.
[quote=“finley”]
This sort of intervention gets really ugly, mainly because governments generally are 30 years behind the curve. I know someone in the UK who runs a modern organic farm but has to register everything she does with it - what is being planted and where - as if they were using the standard monocrop method. Organic planting just doesn’t work like that, so she basically has to make up some bullshit to conform with what the government thinks a farmer does. Giving every farmer X liters of water for crop Y, based on what the government thinks crop Y needs, leaves no incentive for innovation.
Far better, surely, to just have farmers pay for the water they use (other than rainwater that falls onto their farm, of course). Extraction from waterways, for whatever reason, should be metered and billed as public property. In countries like Taiwan - which receive a lot of rainfall on average - there is absolutely no need for a farmer to use external sources of water. Some sort of local short-term storage would be advisable, but that need not be more than a few cubic meters per hectare to avoid water stress during the (short) dry seasons, during which the farmers ought to be growing only appropriate crops (with low water demands) in the first place.[/quote]
But there should be some regulation, for there’s a problem of water scarcity (in the island where it rains half the days!). Yeah, it can be done wrong, laws can be far from reality, but that applies to everything, and we still need rules, specially under dedicated situations.
Now I think that it’s also true that the rains in the north are more frequent than in the south. Long time ago I thought, for my own country, that there should be some system for moving water from rainy places to those more arid. Yeah, rivers don’t always have the course we would like. This sounds like science fiction or just stupid, but… let’s see what the future brings.
Taiwan has huge regional variations in rainfall which I experienced firsthand having lived in both Taipei and Taichung over many years.
Taiwan’s water storage system is also limited because typhoons can fill reservoirs to max after a couple of hits but then the population has heavy demand and there are no big waterways to extract water from, and the sporadic nature of typhoons make it difficult to plan out. But industry and agriculture use a shit load of water here for such a small island, those electronics plants depend on large quantities of water for some reason…and then you have tire plants etc down South. You can’t shift water North to South or vice versa like the US and China, and even then that’s no guarantee over the long term.
Oh, so it’s not only possible, but some countries do it.
Farmers have a LOT of local storage. Look at satellite maps of Taoyuan, around the airport area, and you will see maybe 500 ponds, most of them more than 1km in circumference.
And that’s just in the Dayuan area.
I think most of them have been leased or sold off for fish farming, which is probably a lot more profitable than rice-growing.
Oh, so it’s not only possible, but some countries do it.[/quote]
Yes Colorado river is a famous example, now China has a similar water diversion scheme to bring water to the parched North from the South.
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Does any of these cases have mountains to deal with? Let me rephrase that… was it necessary in any of those cases to take the water through mountains?
the government promoting water conservation…
Oh, so it’s not only possible, but some countries do it.[/quote]
Just because it’s technically possible doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Moving water is - obviously - a zero-sum game. If you want to give water to this person over here, that other person over there loses the same amount. Is that fair? On top of that, the cost of actually moving large volumes of low-value commodity is prohibitive. Rainfall is what it is. If your climate is dry then deal with it. Plant things that need less water or manufacture things that don’t need it at all. Taiwan’s climate is NOT dry. We have more than enough. Any problems are caused by waste, pure and simple.
My bit of land in Taiwan is 100% rain-fed. I could probably grow more interesting stuff with minimal irrigation, but I can’t really be bothered. In that area the rainfall is ~2000mm a year, and all the plants are just fine except for a 2-3 month period of hot/dry weather, when I just don’t grow any annuals. If anything, I have too much rain. I certainly don’t need extra, although a storage tank would be sensible.
Down south towards Tainan it’s probably more challenging. In the Philippines I have land which gets more like 1400mm/year, 30+ degrees all year round, with a 4-5 month dry season during which there is literally no rainfall. Nevertheless, I planted 3 moringa seeds in the middle of the dry season (2 months ago) and as of last week there’s a 6-inch seedling growing quite happily. No water except morning dew. No secret magic here: just a 4-inch mulch layer. The solution is not to pipe water from Taipei to Tainan, but to match industry and farming to the local climate.
Yes, and no. This island is overpopulated and apparently they don’t even produce enough basic food for all: the import things such peppers, meat and milk. Or at least things that resemble them. If it happens to be that an area has an excess of water, or at least is very well naturally supplied with water, I don’t see the problem to use an efficient, if it exists, way of moving water from one place to the another that has water scarcity.
Still I think that you are right: crops and consume should match climate and resources.
How many millions of liters of water a day are lost to eroding or inefficient infrastructure? I’m guessing it’s a lot. Empty the dam rivers if need be, just don’t make me have to use a bucket for a toilet.
I go through umbrellas faster than cheap sandals. Everything I see is green and yet there’s a shortage of water. What would this place do if they had REAL water problems? 
[quote=“jesus80”]Yes, and no. This island is overpopulated and apparently they don’t even produce enough basic food for all: the import things such peppers, meat and milk. Or at least things that resemble them. If it happens to be that an area has an excess of water, or at least is very well naturally supplied with water, I don’t see the problem to use an efficient, if it exists, way of moving water from one place to the another that has water scarcity.
Still I think that you are right: crops and consume should match climate and resources.[/quote]
The Japanese worked on the famous Jhia-Nan irrigation scheme around a century ago, and that scheme is still very important to the prosperity of farmers in the region. But there’s simply a limit to local water storage resources anyway. Climate change has resulted in very serious droughts in the US and Australia recently and perhaps some cities and areas may have to be abandoned in time …who knows whats in store for parts of Taiwan. Certainly smarter use of water should be key and some policies might have to change. In South Australia they now have strict limits on farmers water usage and crop planting.
[quote=“buzzkill1”]How many millions of liters of water a day are lost to eroding or inefficient infrastructure? I’m guessing it’s a lot. Empty the dam rivers if need be, just don’t make me have to use a bucket for a toilet.
I go through umbrellas faster than cheap sandals. Everything I see is green and yet there’s a shortage of water. What would this place do if they had REAL water problems? [/quote]
Brazil has 1/8th the world’s supply of water. Gee what would Sao Paolo be like if facing a REAL water problem?
