Days from Harvest, Western Guangdong Farmers Face ‘World’s Wind King’

Hao Nan explained that the storm’s track actually shifted slightly southward, shrinking the radius of its Force 12 winds by nearly 90%. The scale of damage caused by a typhoon is directly tied to its wind strength.

Furthermore, even within the Force 12 wind zone, the disparity in damage between urban built-up areas and rural regions was stark.

Hao Nan added that, as a rule, urban municipal infrastructure in China is engineered to withstand Force 12 winds. Below this threshold, cities generally recover swiftly; once it is breached, however, disaster losses multiply rapidly. For rural areas, however, a Force 10 wind zone is already sufficient to inflict devastating damage on agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fisheries, along with their foundational infrastructure. Such losses are difficult to prevent entirely and can only be mitigated, underscoring why vulnerable rural areas must strengthen their climate resilience.

Between 08:00 on 24 September and 08:00 on 25 September, during Typhoon Huajiasha’s passage, wind speeds in Yangjiang’s urban district exceeded Force 13, causing severe damage. Meanwhile, Hailing Island in Yangjiang and Shangchuan and Xiachuan Islands in Taishan—areas comprised mainly of townships and rural communities—experienced winds of Force 14 to 17. As townships, Shangchuan and Xiachuan temporarily lost all communications.

2. Yangjiang: Net cages scattered, farmers left devastated

“There is simply no question of resuming production or work. I wipe my tears, crouch on the raft and shout up at the sky, crying out for justice,” said Zeng Xianguan, Secretary-General of the Zhapo Cage Aquaculture Association, in a hoarse voice to Foodthink. He explained that many of the fish rafts on Hailing Island had been torn apart and mangled. “The nets are shredded, and the fish have been swept away.”

Zeng Xianguan still vividly recalls the date 17 years ago – 24 September 2008 – when Typhoon Megi made landfall in Yangjiang. It brought force 16 winds and remains the most devastating storm in Hailing Island’s forty-year aquaculture history. Yet “Huajiasa” proved even more severe.

Speaking to Red Star News, Zeng explained that within the local aquaculture sector, cage farming has suffered particularly heavy losses due to a lack of effective defences against extreme high winds. Although the timber currently used for the rafts is of good quality and capable of withstanding force 11 winds, it is completely helpless against gusts reaching force 12 or higher. Ahead of the typhoon, farmers had little choice but to loosely brace the rafts with long mooring lines and sell off a portion of their pompano stock at reduced prices.

But it was simply too late to offload the stock. “Every household was trying to sell at once; you cannot just sell whenever you please,” he told Foodthink. Under normal conditions, the purchase price for golden pompano sits between 22 and 25 yuan per jin. But in the frantic days before the typhoon arrived, buyers offered 3.5 to 4 yuan less per jin than the usual rate.

As for the overall losses to the aquaculture sector, individual households are down anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million yuan, though exact figures remain impossible to calculate. He said, “Nobody has officially reported their losses yet. The municipal authorities in Yangjiang are still trying to compile the data, but it’s simply not possible to finalise it at this stage.”

He illustrated the scale for Foodthink: a major deep-water operation might run over 150 net cages. Each cage spans roughly 100 by 100 metres and holds 120,000 to 130,000 fish, each weighing close to half a kilogram. “That translates to a loss of 18 million jin (9,000 tonnes) of fish,” he explained.

Local industry insiders added that efforts to secure insurance for the fisheries sector have been ongoing for two decades, yet “every year we campaign for it, and every year we come up empty.” The peril of natural disasters is simply too great, and insurers are wary of running at a loss.

The risks are mounting, yet returns continue to shrink. “It gets worse year on year. We’re losing money,” said Zeng Xuanguang. Under the weight of compounding pressures, traditional nearshore timber raft aquaculture in the region has failed to turn a profit in recent years. Coastal farming damages the local ecosystem, degrades water quality, and is steadily being phased out, all while production costs climb. Feed prices have also surged by more than 20%, with suppliers increasingly insisting on cash settlements. Most critically, purchase prices for pomfret continue to be driven down.

“These days, the only people making any money are those who own large vessels capable of deep-water farming, and who can also handle the transport and trading themselves,” he observed. Yet on Hailing Island alone, there are still 462 households operating nearshore timber rafts, compared with fewer than 100 in deep-water aquaculture.

Under these circumstances, running a raft farming operation is virtually impossible without taking on debt. Zeng noted that many cultivators on Hailing Island have already mortgaged their homes, yet even a property worth one million yuan typically yields only a quarter of that in a loan. Some families have exhausted their emergency savings and even funds set aside for temple offerings to keep their operations afloat, yet their debts remain far from settled.

“Quite a few who took out loans to farm fish have been devastated by losses to the point they can hardly find the words. My father just came back from the orchard and told me about a fish farmer nearby who sat slumped in despair beside his fish ponds,” said Huang Ting, a resident of another town in Yangjiang, who has witnessed the plight of local aquaculturists firsthand.

Huang’s father has been cultivating fruit trees in the area for more than a decade, but years of experience and hard work offered little protection against the devastation of the storm, leaving the orchard badly damaged. Local crop insurance costs over 400 yuan per mu, and after asking around, she found that not a single farmer in the affected area had purchased it. While the town’s agricultural office has now opened a channel for farmers to report losses, there is no guarantee that any compensation will be forthcoming.

A rural documentary filmmaker and Bilibili content creator known as “Yuzhen Jishi” travelled across Zhanjiang, Maoming and Yangjiang in the period surrounding the storm, interviewing numerous farmers and fish farmers. He discovered that the damage across Yangjiang’s towns and villages far exceeded that in neighbouring prefectures, and the devastation was not confined to aquaculture. Among those ruined were a banana grove tended by a couple from Xinyang in Henan, and 50,000 sugarcane plants cultivated by another couple from Taizhou in Zhejiang. Their temporary prefabricated housing on the field edges was also torn apart by the gales, walls collapsing and roofs torn clean off. The banana crop was merely a fortnight away from harvest, with growers banking on the Mid-Autumn and National Day holiday season to fetch a premium price.

Taishan City, under the jurisdiction of Jiangmen, was also severely battered by Typhoon Huangjiasha. A citrus grower in Haiyan Town is based just 10 kilometres from Taishan City’s Shangchuan Island, where gusts exceeding Force 17 were recorded. Speaking to Jiupai News, he said his 100-mu citrus orchard and 200-square-metre makeshift workshop were completely flattened, even though he had paid to brace the trees with thick wooden poles before the storm hit. The grower explained that October and November are normally the peak harvest months for citrus. After the typhoon, the trees will yield no fruit for two years, resulting in losses exceeding RMB 1 million. Zhang Qing lives around Shangchuan and Xiachuan Islands in Taishan, where her family runs a cold storage business. During the two-day local power outage, hundreds of thousands of yuan worth of goods were left in the storage facility, and the extent of the losses remains unknown. Over the past few days, she has been staying in the main urban area of Taishan with her family.

Taishan is renowned for its oyster farming. Zhang Qing has also heard from relatives that oyster rafts along the coast from Haiyan Town to Guanghai Town have all suffered devastating losses.

Yet locals are still pulling themselves together, readying themselves for the customer traffic and business of the National Day holiday.

Along the coast, farmers use floating rafts to raise fish, while inland waters further from the sea are used for earthen ponds, known locally as ‘xianwei’ (saline enclosures).But after the typhoon passed, the ponds flooded and breached, merging the thousands of mu of farmland belonging to dozens of farmers into a single expanse of water. All the fish, prawns, and crabs escaped.

A mud crab farmer in Xincun, Duhu Town, Taishan City, lost his entire stock from a 50-mu pond this way. He told Foodthink that the crabs were fully grown, but farmers had been holding them back to fetch better prices during the National Day holiday. Now, losses amount to at least RMB 20,000 per mu.

Official figures show that the total area of saline enclosure aquaculture in Xincun, Duhu Town, exceeds 6,000 mu.

For these farmers, there was little protective action they could take. Earthen ponds cannot be reinforced in advance; “there’s nowhere to put the soil.” On the night of the 24th, when the typhoon made landfall, they were ordered to evacuate the ponds. He paid out of pocket to stay in a hotel in town. When he returned to the ponds on the 25th, “there was nothing left but water and grass.” His house, boats, and ponds were completely destroyed.

More than a decade ago, he came from Guangxi to this area to work in aquaculture, signing a lease with local villagers at a rate of RMB 2,000 per mu. Most of the local ponds are leased by outsiders. “Given how often we see typhoons, locals probably don’t even want to farm them anymore,” he said with a wry smile.

Taishan had already weathered one disaster. Records show that Typhoon Trami made a direct landfall in Taishan, Guangdong, at 8:50 am on 8 September, with central winds reaching Force 11. Coupled with an astronomical high tide, it caused severe seawater inundation, heavily damaging aquaculture in Duhu, Haiyan, and Lianzhou in Zhuhai.

“Water got in before, but not as badly as this time,” the farmer said.

The water has yet to recede. On the 25th, he paid to hire an excavator to rebuild the earthen bunds around the ponds.

Another mud crab farmer in Chixi Town, Taishan, also sent through footage of the damage to his property. “It’s over. I’ve lost everything.” The video shows the ponds completely collapsed, with not a single crab left in the empty, torn nets. Several farmers stand dejectedly beside steel sheds torn down by the wind. This post-80s farmer had previously shared his crab-farming tips with great enthusiasm on his own video channel.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” That was his final reply.

People in Taishan have decades of experience dealing with typhoons. In Zhang Qing’s memory, in the early 2000s, two large vessels sank near the Nansha Islands during a typhoon while docked in her hometown’s fishing port, claiming over 200 lives, including the father of her kindergarten classmate. With information so readily available today, fishermen no longer stay on board to ride out the storm, choosing not to face whatever fate may befall them alongside their vessels.

But faced with increasingly severe extreme weather, how long can farmers and fishermen continue to hold out?

IV. Saltwater Intrusion: A Long Road to Recovery and Faint Hope

Hao Nan specifically drew attention to the severe storm surges that Huajiasha could trigger: saltwater intrusion causing irreversible damage to coastal farmland. In 2014, when Super Typhoon Rammasun struck Wenchang, Hainan, Luodou Farm faced a similar tragedy. Situated on the western flank of Dongzhai Harbour, an inlet extending into the Hainan peninsula, the farm lies on a flat coastal plain that was once rich in produce and fertile soil. However, prolonged exposure to seawater allowed salt to leach into the earth, rendering it saline and alkaline and forcing a switch to salt-tolerant rice. Compounding the crisis, the convergence of Huajiasha with an astronomical high tide brought severe storm surges to low-lying regions around the Pearl River Estuary, Yangjiang, and Jiangmen. For example, the Sanjiangkou tide monitoring station in Jiangmen recorded levels of 2.81 metres—surpassing the 1.8-metre warning mark by 1.01 metres and shattering the 1952 record of 2.79 metres.

Analysing satellite imagery and topographical data, Hao Nan concluded that storm surges affected parts of Zhuhai’s Jinwan District, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, and Yangjiang near the Pearl River Estuary. Notably, Jinwan District features a funnel-like topography where the coastline narrows sharply, amplifying the surge most dramatically. Even before the typhoon’s core made landfall, as it approached the outer Pearl River Estuary, it had already pushed the seawater inland.

Reports indicate that, a decade ago, 13,400 mu (approximately 890 hectares) of land in Pingsha Town, Jinwan District, had already begun to undergo salinisation due to saltwater intrusion and natural conditions, and was already engaged in a protracted restoration process. Beyond wind damage, Foodthink also noted via short-video platforms that citrus orchards in Xinhui, Jiangmen, have likewise suffered from seawater erosion.

Compared with the immediately visible, acute losses of destroyed fish farms and snapped fruit trees, the damage wrought by saltwater intrusion—contaminated groundwater, soil salinisation, and wetland degradation—affects a wider, more concealed area and demands a far longer recovery. In simpler terms, saltwater intrusion does more than render soil saline; it disrupts or suppresses microbial activity, thereby interfering with the microbial-driven cycles of carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, iron, and other essential elements. Of course, even without understanding these microscopic scientific findings, farmers looking at land washed over by seawater know precisely how devastating the aftermath will be.

Saltwater intrusion can also alter the distribution of heavy metals in the soil. Experiments conducted by researchers at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have shown that rising salinity affects the mobility of cadmium in soil, potentially leading to its accumulation in rice. In other words, those affected are not just farmers, but could also extend to consumers whose diets rely heavily on rice.

Yet, as climate change intensifies, record-breaking storm surges will grow more frequent. Coupled with rising temperatures driving sea-level rise, these rapid and gradual forces will compound one another, ensuring that saltwater intrusion will only worsen in the years ahead.

What comes next? “Onward (grinning face).” This was the response posted on WeChat Channels by a farmer from Dong’an, Hunan, who cultivates sugarcane in Jiangmen.

In a video he posted on 25 September, dozens of mu of sugarcane fields were submerged in several centimetres of standing water. Fortunately, they had narrowly escaped disaster, with relatively few stalks flattened. Before the typhoon arrived, he had reinforced the entire plot using thick tree branches and nylon netting. “I’ve done everything I possibly could! I just hope you’ll show some mercy!”

This year, he plans to return to his hometown for the Lunar New Year. Next year, the sugarcane fields will be planted once more.

*All maps used in this article are sourced from the Guangdong Provincial Public Map Service website. Link: https://nr.gd.gov.cn/map/#/public/standar- map/map-class/%E5%B9%BF%E4%B8%9C%E7%9C%81%E5%85%A8%E5%9B%BE

Foodthink Author

Pei Dan

A writer returning to her craft, with a focus on the individuals navigating climate change, ecological shifts, and environmental transformation

 

 

 

 

Note: Huang Ting and Zhang Qing are pseudonyms used in this article.

Editors: Ling Yu, Tianle