Friday, March 26, 2004
By Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated Press

SHANGHAI, China — Environmental damage from China's breakneck economic growth, the spread of AIDS, and growing poverty threaten the future of China's drive to better living standards, the United Nations said.

China faces daunting shortages of productive farmland and water, said the U.N. Development Program study. Untreated sewage discharge and industrial effluent have left most rivers, lakes, and groundwater heavily polluted, it said.

"China is not yet on track in reversing the loss of its environmental resources," said the report, which assesses the country's ability to meet goals set by the Millennium Summit in 2000.

Those goals include halving extreme poverty and hunger worldwide by 2015.

The report underscores tough challenges facing the country as it struggles to balance economic growth with the pressures of its rising population.

Acknowledging the human cost of dramatic growth, China's leaders say they're adjusting policies to ensure sustainable development.

The report, released Thursday, praised China's success in reducing the number of rural poor from 250 million in 1978 to 30 million in 2000 and in providing safe drinking water to more than three-quarters of its 1.3 billion people.

But it also pointed to a growing income gap between cities and the countryside and the rising numbers of unemployed workers falling back into poverty.

Earlier this month, China's parliament approved heavy new spending to help the rural poor.

Some of the report's most dire findings concerned China's growing struggle with the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Despite some improvements in treating HIV and AIDS patients, China must take more effective action to reverse the spread of the virus, which has already has infected about 1 million people in this country, the report warned.

It noted low condom use, poor-quality condoms, and high rates of infection among intravenous drug users and in the sex industry.

"If China does not take up the fight against AIDS seriously and actively, there could be up to 10 million people living with HIV/AIDS by 2010," Khalid Malik, U.N. resident coordinator in China, said in a statement from Beijing.

U.N. officials first issued such forecasts two years ago. They since have been largely accepted by Chinese officials, who previously hid the country's AIDS problem as a national embarrassment.

"A further explosion in the number of people with AIDS could hurt China's efforts to alleviate poverty," Malik said.

The U.N. report said China was ahead of schedule in meeting another Millennial Development goal: ensuring primary schooling for all children. Average primary school enrollment reached 99.1 percent in 2000, though it was only 95 percent for girls in impoverished western regions, it said, urging greater equality.

The report did not explain the basis for those figures, and many experts working in the field put the numbers substantially lower.

A U.N. human rights special rapporteur on the right to education, who visited China last September, ranked China near the bottom among nations in public education funding and criticized discrimination against the children of impoverished migrant workers.

A growing imbalance between birth rates for boys and girls, because of traditional preferences for male heirs, has left a ratio of 116 boys to every 100 girls, the report said.

It also noted high suicide rates among rural women and a high prevalence of domestic violence, which occurs in one in three Chinese families.

Source: Associated Press