Widespread, prolonged drought is affecting nearly five million people in northern China, the Office of the State Flood Control and Draught Relief Headquarters said Tuesday.
   
The drought, worsened by high temperatures and strong winds, has also affected 11.1 million hectares of arable land, and 4.8 million head of livestock.
   
The office said the drought has severely affected crop planting and growth in northern areas.
   
In northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 5,733 hectares of crops have withered and crops could not be planted on a further 100,000 hectares of land, said Zhang Zhitong, deputy director of the office.
   
Zhang said that 77 percent of all the reservoirs in Ningxia have dried up and almost 800 more in northern Hebei and Shanxi provinces and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have emptied.
   
A rare drought has also affected 730,000 people and about 300,000 hectares of crops in northwestern Gansu Province, said the regional climate center of Lanzhou, capital of Gansu.
   
The center said that rainfall from mid-March through April was down 40 to 90 percent over the same period in previous years in Baiyin, Dingxi, Tianshui and Longnan in eastern Gansu.
   
The drought will continue in most parts of the northern areas with no significant rainfall forecast in the next ten days, the Central Meteorological Observatory said on Tuesday.

(Xinhua News Agency May 16, 2007)