Dust, Waste and Dirty Water: the Deadly Price of China's Miracle

Hundreds of millions of people are being made ill every year or dying prematurely from pollution caused by China's breakneck economic growth, a leading economic thinktank has concluded following an 18 month investigation.

The OECD study, prepared at China's request, spells out the scale of the ecological crisis now engulfing the country, poisoning its people and holding it back economically.

It says up to 300 million people are drinking contaminated water every day, and 190 million are suffering from water related illnesses each year. If air pollution is not controlled, it says, there will be 600,000 premature deaths in urban areas and 20 million cases of respiratory illness a year within 15 years.

China's water quality gives the researchers greatest concern. One third of the length of all China's rivers is now "highly polluted" as are 75% of its major lakes and 25% of all its coastal waters. Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhea due to polluted water each year.

Although China is the world's fourth largest economy, and is closing rapidly on the US, Japan and Germany, its environmental standards are often closer to those in some of the poorest countries, says the report. More than 17,000 towns have no sewage works and the human waste from nearly 1 billion people is barely collected or treated. "A majority of the water flowing through China's urban areas is unsuitable for drinking or fishing," says the report.

Although China has tried to improve its air quality, it has not invested enough to keep up with the flood of people to its cities, many of which have some of the worst pollution in the world. The burning of more than than 2bn tonnes of the dirtiest coal a year is costing the economy the equivalent of 3-7% of GDP, (£8-15bn a year), according to the report.

"A healthy economy needs a healthy environment," said Mario Amano, deputy secretary-general of the OECD - the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - in Beijing yesterday.

The report estimates that 27% of China's land mass is now becoming desertified. Much of the country already suffers from water shortages, but the report expects water demand to increase by nearly 50% in the next 40 years. Industry's share of this is expected to grow from 16% to 41%.