Central China's Hunan Province will spend 6.52 billion yuan (US$785 million) to clean up pollution in the water and air in the next three years.

With the investment, air quality and ground surface water in all cities of Hunan will be fundamentally improved by the year of 2007, said Jiang Yimin, director of Hunan Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau.

According to him, 90 projects will be completed with the three-year environmental improvement campaign. The province will invest 2.73 billion yuan (about US$329 million) in projects calculated to harness water pollution.

Lying mostly to the south of Yangtze River, China's longest, Hunan is known as a "land of rice and fish." It is also one of the country's important open-market grain production bases.

(Xinhua News Agency January 28, 2005)