China is facing its most severe natural disasters for six years, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said on Thursday.

By August 15, the natural disasters that occurred this year had killed 2,006 people, affected more than 316 million people and caused economic losses of 160 billion yuan (20 billion U.S. dollars).

The disasters had also resulted in 624 people missing and 12.95 million residents being evacuated, and nearly 36 million hectares of farmland have been affected.

A total of 1.53 million houses collapsed during the disasters and more than 4.1 million were destroyed, according to the figures released by the National Center for Disaster Reduction under the ministry.

"All the figures such as the affected population, death tolls and economic losses were all above the average level of the same periods since 2001," said Wang Zhenyao, director of the center.

Compared with past years, the natural disasters this year have occurred earlier and have been stronger in scale and longer in duration. They were also more frequent and of various kinds, leading to high death tolls and great economic losses, according to Li Baojun, an official with the ministry.

In addition, the disasters this year were quite rare to some extent, officials said. "The movement of typhoons were hard to predict, like they were controlled by something," said Wang.

He told Xinhua that when Typhoon Bilis landed on July 14, some villagers were gathering in a shelter. After the initial impact the gales seemed to have subsided so the villagers opened the door to check outside. Suddenly the gales rushed in and toppled the building, killing 49.

Heavy rainfall to the south of the Yangtze River were nearly one month earlier than previous years, and during the 44 days before August 9, each new typhoon arrived in China only nine days apart from each other. Other rare occurrences also include the heavy snowfall earlier this year in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Thirteen heavy snowfalls hit the Altay region in Xinjiang, which affected 139,000 people and caused 150 million yuan (18.75 million U.S. dollars) of economic losses.

"Our past experiences did not enable us to cope with these rare occurrences," said Wang.

Since May, east China's Fujian Province has suffered seven rounds of large-scale flooding and typhoons, which have also hit the provinces and regions of Hunan, Guangdong, Jiangxi and Guangxi at least three times. Typhoon Saomai, the eighth of the year and the strongest in the last 50 decades, had left 325 dead by Thursday.

While flooding is swamping the south, northern and western regions are being savaged by drought.

According to the ministry, searing heat and lack of rain has continued in Chongqing Municipality and eastern Sichuan Province since the beginning of summer.

Some areas are suffering from the most severe droughts in 50 years, leaving 11 million people and thousands of livestock with drinking water shortages. The direct economic losses have reached 7 billion yuan (875 million U.S. dollars).

Even more severe conditions are continuing in Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia provinces and regions, some of which have either received no proper rainfall since November 2004, or the total quantity of rain since last year is less than 200 millimeters.

Although a number of regions have been hit by natural disasters, it is the underdeveloped areas which are affected most, said Wang, calling for greater efforts in disaster relief and reconstruction in those areas.

Source: Xinhua