"Without water, farmers can hardly farm," said Water Resources Minister Chen Lei. "But if we do not promote agricultural water conservation, we will gradually fail to meet the target of producing more than 500 billion kilograms of grain each year."

China sorely needs to save water, which is in ever-greater demand for industrial, residential and environmental protection purposes. These uses are squeezing the amount of water available for farm irrigation.

Even more problematic, traditional but wasteful irrigation methods are still used in most areas of China. For instance, on the Chengdu Plain in the southwest China's Sichuan Province, farmers still flood their land with the water from the Dujiangyan Irrigation Works built more than 2,250 years ago.

Farmland with new irrigation technology accounts for only 35 percent of the total. In some developed countries, such as Israel, 80 percent of farms use water-saving technologies.

And even though it's hard to conserve water, China needs to provide an extra 30 billion cubic meters of water to irrigate farmland, if it is to meet the target of 950 million mu of irrigated land under cultivation in 2020, industrial officials said.

Despite pressing demand, China is unlikely to increase irrigated water supplies in the near future, considering the current water resources and the pace of social and economic development, industry officials said. The answer lies in conservation just to stay in place, they said.

China has promoted water-conserving irrigation technologies for many years. Substantial progress was made starting in the mid-1990s, when new technology from Israel and elsewhere was introduced.

Film-mulched drip irrigation, which uses a combination of agricultural film and trickle irrigation technologies, is particularly efficient.

Jia Xiwu, a villager in Tongyu County, Jilin Province, has used the technique on 15 mu of land since last year. He found it minimized the use of water by allowing the water to drip slowly to the roots of plants through a network of valves, pipes, tubing and emitters.

"The drip irrigation method I learned from county technicians saves 60 to 70 percent on water and increases corn output by 40 percent," he said.

China has promoted other water-saving irrigation methods. For instance, the sprinkler irrigation technique can cut water use by 50 percent and raise farm output by 20 to 30 percent.

With conservation efforts, nearly 14 billion cubic meters of water have been saved annually since the 1990s. About 23.3 million ha of farmland has been covered with water-efficient irrigation systems, said Chen.

The combination of financial savings and higher output achieved by the newer techniques has made water conservation attractive to China's farmers.

According to Yao Fucai, director of the Yaofu Town Water Conservation Association in Pingluo County, in northwest China's Ningxia, the town has managed to use the same amount of water to irrigate an extra 16,000 mu of land it has put under cultivation it expanded in recent years. It now has 83,000 mu of farmland.

Water-conserving irrigation methods and technologies also help expand the total amount of land that can be irrigated, as irrigation reduces the saline and alkaline content of soil.

Over the past decade, the Jiangdong irrigation area in Qiqiha'er City, in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, has quadrupled the size of its rice fields to 120,000 mu.