The Long Drought

Being from a rural island, where my family were farmers. I probably understand the underlying factors of this drought. The newspapers covers this extensively, so information about this is easy to get.

— Wei Chen

The Northern Drought started two year, when the autumn harvest failed in about 300 counties. The otherwise fertile and the farming techniques of the north is admire by many other counties. However, the north relies on the summer monsoon which arrived late, the crops were dying before the monsoon had arrived, and at the time it arrived it brought flood with it to the rivers on the islands.

Type

Natural

Affected Regions

Shuangren 爽荏

Guanxi 关西
Jiangdong 江东
[Placeholder name]
Ningchang 宁昌
Di'en'er 谛恩尔
Guanli 管理

The Underlying Causation

While the drought itself would not have impacted Feidao as much, the underlying causations for why the drought became so severe, made it the worst environmental condition in decades.

Despite having the resource of the moist from the cloud-sea, the irrigation system could not produce enough water for all the cultivated crops, and most areas are heavily dependent on rainfall.
The transformation of several islands' landscapes has caused the terrain's ability to retain moist from the cloud-sea and rainfall to be lower. Many trees have been felled on these agricultural lands, which would otherwise maintain the moist in the ground through their roots. Deforestation has happened at the slopes along rivers which has lead to erosion, making it easier for the regions near rivers to be flooded.

The Societal Upheaval

With the drought came rats, that entered granaries and started eating the corn and wheat inside. They brought diseases with them. The food production in these regions also became difficult when the seedlings of wheat died during autumn, failed, this lead to the wheat harvest were only 10% of what is usually is. The means of production also became an issue. The production tools is sold to buy food, livestock for farming is slaughtered to feed the owners. And the granaries was ravaged by rats, if it were not destroyed in the floods.

The harsh conditions on these islands, caused the people started to migrate to escape. And then the plague came with the rats, affecting some remaining livestocks and people. Because of the migration the plague moved along to other islands.

The most severe event cases in each of the five provinces can be seen in the table.

With all the above mentioned causations from the drought, came the The Great Famine, where more than 500,000 people died of famine-related diseases and starvation for millions of people. With the food pricing rising, people started to look for alternative food, such as bark, roots, and leaves from trees.
Starvation can lead to people do rash things like looting of supply runs and rebellion. A rebellion happened recently against the government, some rebels have military background and think themselves as better alternative to the current president. Rumour has it, that with the overall crisis in rural areas of soil exhaustion, deforestation, erosion, and flooding, which is also made worse by primitive technology, inadequate credit, and exploitative tenancy arrangements, the rural population has slowly turned to a new political grass-root movement.