Poor IPR protection reduces the willingness of Chinese companies to invest in developing proprietary processes and technologies. There is not likely to be sufficient large-scale settlement in China's northwest to require the western route. Much less preparatory work has been done on the western route of the South-North Water Transfer Project, compared to the central and eastern routes. Seventy percent of the one million tons of agricultural chemicals used in China each year are pesticides, and seventy percent of those pesticides are highly toxic. A July 2000 notice from the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture banned the use of some pesticides, such as parathion and methyl parathion, in orchards, and halted new approvals for some other types of especially toxic pesticides.
China has no pesticide user certification system.
The Three Gorges-Chongqing area suffers from severe water pollution from chemical, paper, food processing, tanning, and textile plants according to 58 experts who gave a report at a September Beijing conference sponsored by the China Water Environment Association. Three hundred of the 390 most serious pollution sources on the upstream half of the Yangtze River are in the Three Gorges-Chongqing area. Windpower is one of the Chinese government's strategies to bring electric power to 80 million Chinese living in border regions.