As the 39-year-old peasant woman stands with her broad-brimmed hat under a sweltering blue mid-day sky, she explains what is at stake as the drought on south China's Hainan island drags on.

"My husband and I have a large family to feed, two children and two pairs of grandparents, and right now there's just not enough money to make ends meet," she says, poking with a stick at rice she has left to dry on the road.

An island on the edge of the vast Pacific, Hainan gets a large part of its rain during the typhoon season. The problem is, for two years now, there has not been a single typhoon, and global warming may be to blame.

"There's a lot of causes behind the drought," says a forecaster with the Hainan provincial meteorological bureau, surnamed Xing. "Global warming is one of them."

The Dongping reservoir in the highlands of central Hainan used to be a sizable man-made lake, providing ample water for thousands of sugar and rubber farmers. Now it is little more than a pit, with peasants standing and sitting aimlessly in clusters nearby, because there is little work for them to do in the fields.

It is the worst drought in half a century, and out of the island's eight million people, nearly one million have difficulty getting drinkable water.

Hainan is just a tiny spot on the China map, but what it is experiencing now could be a harbinger of things to come for other and more populous parts of the country -- and of the world.

According to a Oxford University estimate, by 2050 global warming may have created as many as 150 million "environmental refugees" worldwide.

They will have fled coastlines vulnerable to rising sea levels, storms or floods -- or agricultural land that became too arid to cultivate.

Global warming combines with China's booming economy to put a severe strain on the country's resources, says Paul Harris, an expert on the politics of environmental pollution at Hong Kong's Lingnan University.

"An increasing number of Chinese scientists are coming to the conclusion that global warming will have profoundly adverse impacts for China," he says. "Places that are dry will become even drier."

-- Longer term consequences --

Hainan has experienced localized droughts at relatively frequent intervals in the past, but this time the entire province is affected.

"It hasn't happened for ages, and it has affected agriculture enormously," says an official with the provincial agricultural bureau, surnamed Jiang. "All kinds of agricultural products -- rice, fruits and rubber -- have suffered," she says.

Life has always been precarious for farming communities on the island because of the scarce and unsteady water supply. Aquifers in stone or concrete crisscross the green valleys, monuments to the attention that people have traditionally paid to irrigation. Even the place names make it obvious how important water has been for past generations.

Liukoushui, "The Six Wells", is the name of one of the villages nesting on top of one of the tree-covered hills in the island's interior. In the middle of Liukoushui, farmers are sitting around, waiting stoically. "It will be worse in July," one of them says.

Villagers in a nearby settlement have decided to take matters into their own hands, digging a well to keep the surrounding fields watered. Each family in the village was urged to provide labor for digging the well and pay 500 yuan (60 dollars) for materials such as cement and steel wires.

"Not every family could afford to pay that kind of money," says Wang Yuanxin, the village leader, parched palm fronds crackling under his feet as he paces around the well. "This will last for a good while. If it's exhausted, we will have to go somewhere new and dig."

That is a luxury not shared by everyone on Hainan. Parts of the island are so dry that farmers cannot find water, no matter how deep they dig. "Sometimes, they dig even 100 meters (330 feet), and they still find no water," says Jiang, the official at the agriculture bureau.

The option of tapping the groundwater could also have severe long-term consequences.

Thousands of kilometers (miles) away, in northern China, people have discovered to their chagrin what it means to overexploit the groundwater. As the water table on the North China plain has fallen -- according to some measures by 1.5 meters (five feet) annually in recent years -- buildings and sometimes even railroads have collapsed as a result.

Such longer-term consequences are not on the minds of most farming communities on Hainan, who have more immediate worries.

Many of them have heard of failed government efforts to spray the clouds with chemicals to bring about artificial rain, and now realize that they can perhaps expect only minimal additional help.

Although May saw some rain, an official at the Hainan Provincial Metereological Bureau, who declined to give his name, says that while it relieved some isolated areas, "it hasn't helped the overall situation".

"I'm not sure what the government can do about all this. We'll just have to wait and see what the next year will be like," says Li Sunan, the peasant woman with the large family.

It is now all up to nature, and at least Xing, the meteorological analyst, is optimistic for the coming typhoon season which runs from June to October.

"This year, we'll finally have a typhoon, and we'll get more rain," he says. "At least this year will be better than last year."

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