The movie "Feast or Famine" is an intriguing look into China's relationship with mother nature; more specifically the film explores China’s huge problem of water use and rainfall. China's problem is very interesting because of its varying geographic features. In the south, there is often not enough rain, but in the North there is often a problem with flooding. This has been an age old long problem that the Chinese have had to deal with and China has suffered, as the film mentions, some 1200 famines in recoded history. The overall problem is that the Chinese are trying to feed one third of the worlds population with 7% of the world's arable land. The little amount of arable land that is available is constantly being encroached upon by developments, which doesn't help the problem at all.
Along with the problem of lack of arable land and droughts is flooding. As the film showed, hundreds of millions of lives are affected by the water levels of the major Chinese rivers, and much work has to be done by government officials to protect these lives. In 1998 specifically, because of worst flooding since 1954, levies had to be broken and 100,000 farms had to be sacrificed to save millions in the cities. It was saddening to witness the devastation these floods cause but later events in the movie left the viewer with some hope for the future of these people. There were many government programs being devoted to the victims of this natural disaster. The hope for these people lies in China's ingenuity in dealing with these problems, and its abilities to use modern technology and innovations to fight flooding and to keep up the production of food goods to feed the expected 300 million people increase in population over the next 20 years. overall the film provides a sobering view of China's relationship with water, but also extensively explores what is being done to fight and prevent future catastrophe.
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