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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In July, global temperatures were the 6th hottest on record since 1880. In China, an extended heat wave and extreme drought have caused major disruptions in the Southwestern regions of the country. Parts of the Yangtze River have dropped to extraordinarily low levels for this time of year, preventing supply ships from reaching upstream ports.

The drought has set off a power crisis in parts of the region because power-generating hydroelectric dams don't have enough water to produce their typical output. This has meant short-term factory closures, and some places have instituted rolling blackouts. With me now from China is Keith Bradsher, Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. Keith, thanks so much for joining us today.

Keith Bradsher: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you put this into context? How bad is this drought?

Keith Bradsher: The heat wave and the drought have been remarkable. The heat wave, which has finally broken in the last few days but is still leaving a lot of serious problems that will last through the autumn. The heat wave lasted for almost 11 weeks. You had some towns in Southwestern China that didn't just have their hottest day on record but they've had their 15 or 20 hottest days ever on record. That has really parched a large part of central China.

It's a problem because this should be the rainy season. In, for example, Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, they normally get half their annual rain just in July and August. This year, they have received almost none. They received normally another quarter of their rain in June and September and in June they had very little. Finally, in the last few days, there has been some heavy rain in the upstream reaches of the Yangtze but overall, there's still a serious problem.

There's still a drought across much of Central and Southwestern China. The worry is that we're now going into the dry season when water levels fall even lower. That's a problem for supply chains. It's a problem for the crops. It's a problem for power supply and perhaps most importantly, it's a problem for the people of West, Central, and Southwestern China.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We know that of all weather disasters, the heat is actually the most deadly. What have we seen in the short term in terms of the life and health consequences for the people in these regions most affected?

Keith Bradsher: There have not been any mortality statistics issued although we know that heat can be deadly but clearly, this has caused great suffering because the extreme heat and drought has resulted in plummeting electricity supply from hydroelectric dams, with the result that people have had to endure temperatures of up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit with no air conditioning, no electricity, no fans in many cases. It has really been very difficult. On top of that, you've had outbreaks of COVID.

Now Chengdu, just yesterday, in fact, went into a complete citywide lockdown of 21 million people. Now, fortunately, that was after the rain. Some rain has finally arrived, but it's coming after they've already endured two months of increasingly harsh conditions and with periods of no electricity at all until the last several days.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On the longer term, when you're talking about the crops, what effect might this have for both food supply and prices in China and globally?

Keith Bradsher: The effect on prices is mainly in China itself but not globally for interesting reasons. The effect in China is serious because this has damaged a lot of vegetable-growing areas and fruit-growing areas. For example, bok choy, a very popular kind of Chinese cabbage that's a big part of the diet in Southwestern and much of China actually, the price for it has nearly doubled in the past month. Fruit trees have been damaged and it's not clear if they'll recover or whether they may lose five years of fruit production before new trees can grow to replace the ones that have been badly damaged by this drought.

However, fruits and vegetables aren't really traded much in and out of China's interior with the rest of the world. Rice production does not seem to have been hurt that much and China has such large reserves of rice that there shouldn't really be an effect on global rice prices. Corn and wheat are grown elsewhere in China but don't seem to have as much of a problem with the drought. This is primarily a price and food problem for the people in Central and Southwestern China.

Melissa Harris-Perry: However, we should be expecting to see more global supply chain issues associated with the short-term shutdowns of the factories. Is that right?

Keith Bradsher: There's a problem here both short term with the shutdown of the factories and medium term with the low water levels on the Yangtze. The factories themselves were closed for about a week and a half, Toyota, Volkswagen, some big electronics factories that supply the west as well, including big companies like Apple, but to some extent, those factories can catch up by scheduling extra production time to run the assembly lines later this year, Volkswagen has already said it'll do that.

The limit on how many cars you can make these days tends to be how many semiconductors you can get for them, not the number of hours you schedule at the assembly plant. There is a separate problem, however, with these very low water levels. Going into the severe drought, you already had a problem with supply chains coming in and out of Central China with backlogs in trucks and in ships. That had seemed to be getting better over the summer but the very low water levels in the upper reaches of the Yangtze have caused that problem to reappear.

The difficulty is that an ocean-going ship that should be able to go well up the Yangtze, carrying the equivalent of as many as 1,000 very long tractor-trailer freight trucks, now can't go up that far. You're needing to rely more on trucks to carry food inland, Central China does import soybeans and grain that come up the Yangtze River normally. Then it also affects the export of products coming down the Yangtze, that also need to be moved onto trucks. There is an effect on the supply chains here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Keith Bradsher, Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. Thank you.

Keith Bradsher: My pleasure.

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