The health of the Yellow River continues to deteriorate with a number of serious issues plaguing China's second longest river.

Li Guoying, director of the Yellow River Conservancy Committee, said in an interview with Xinhua on Friday that the Yellow River is suffering from pollution, silting and most seriously decreased water flow.

Li blamed overuse of water resources with threatening the life of the Yellow River.

According to Li, 60 percent of the water in the Yellow River, has been used for human and economic activity, compare to the internationally recognized limit of 40 percent utilization ratio of river water.

"The overuse of water has led to repeated cases of the river drying-up leading to a worsening of the entire ecosystem of the river," said Li.

Statistics show that in the 27 years prior to 1999, the lower reaches of the Yellow River ran dry in 21 years, for a total of 1,091 days.

Known as China's "sorrow" and as the cradle of early Chinese civilization, the Yellow River empties into the Bohai Sea in Shandong Province in east China, 5,464-km from its source in the Tibet-Qinghai plateau.

The river supplies water to 12 percent of China's 1.3 billion people and 15 percent of its farmland. It carries 1.3 billion tons of silt from the Loess Plateau downstream the river each year, of which 400 million tons are washed down to the river's lower reaches.

(Xinhua News Agency November 1, 2006)