China- Pollution Hurts Agriculture

Three decades of rapid economic development in China has left a troubling legacy—widespread soil pollution that has contaminated food crops and jeopardized public health. The Yellow River Conservancy Commission, a government Body, surveyed the 'mother river' of China and found that for a third of its length the water was too polluted for use in agriculture. The housing ministry's chief engineer for water safety says only half of the water sources in urban areas are fit to drink. (1) Yixing, in the heart of the Yangtze Delta is on the shore of Lake Tai., China's third largest lake. This lake boasts 800 square miles of fresh water and has been celebrated throughout Chinese history for its abundant fish and beautiful limestone landscape. However, Yixing and the land around it is in China's new industrial landscape. Since the 1990s, nearly 3,000 factories have been built on the once-beautiful shores of the lake. The chemical boom made Yixing one of China's richest country-level towns with a GDP that reached $17 billion in 2012. (2)

In 2007 a toxic algae bloom turned the waters of Lake Tai into foul-smelling green sludge. This episode attracted international attention and was a major embarrassment for the national as well as provincial government. More than 30 million people draw their drinking water from the basin's 53 water sources. The algae bloom had caused a water supply crisis and the lake's water looked like soy sauce. Authorities finally acted. At the end of 2006, Yixing had been home to 1,188 firms producing chemicals. By October 2013, after six years of 'rectification,' 583 had been closed down, merged or reopened as other types of businesses, as were 161 plants in neighboring townships. In late 2013, Yixing started a new round of chemical industry cleanup, with plans to deal with an additional 52 chemical firms over the next two years. (2) Although the local government has now closed the worst of the factories, the pollutants those factories had released in their waste water or sludge ended up in the soil, and the toxic waste from those polluting years continues to threaten the health of the people of the area and beyond. Hunan Province, in central China has some of the worse soil pollution because it is one of China's top producers of non-ferrous metals. But it is also a large rice-growing area, producing 16 percent of the country's rice in 2012. Last year officials found that some rice had excessive levels of cadmium. (3)

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Hunan is only one of many provinces in China that have suffered heavy metal pollution. Incomplete figures from the ministry of Environmental Protection revealed that in 2006, 24.7 million acres of arable land was polluted, 8.3 percent of China's total. But the government has been slow to understand the seriousness of the problem. (4) Total cleanup costs could eventually reach $1.6 trillion. A private industry body predicted that between 2014 and 2020 China's soil remediation market could be worth nearly $110 billion. For now, however, financing for these projects is tight. Then there's the issue of smog and photosynthesis. Worsening smog on the mainland is blocking natural light and could spell disaster for agriculture, scientist have warned. An experiment in Beijing showed a drastic slowdown in the photosynthesis process, which allows plants to thrive. Applied on a larger scale, such a slowdown could affect agriculture. The warning comes as choking air is blanketing a quarter of the mainland and scientists say they are already seeing the detrimental effects. Chili and tomato seeds, which normally take about 20 days to grow into seedlings under artificial light in a laboratory, took more than two months to sprout at a greenhouse farm in Beijing. (5) References

1. “The East is Grey,” The Economist, August 30, 2013
2. He Guangwei, “China's dirty pollution secret: the boom poisoned its soil and crops,” e360.yale.edu, June 30, 2014
3. Edward Wong, “One-fifth of China's farmland is polluted, state study finds,” The New York Times, April 17, 2014
4. He Guangwei, “The soil pollution crisis in China; a cleanup present a daunting challenge,” e360.yale.edu, July 14, 2014
5. Stephen Chen, “Agriculture feels the choke as China smog starts to foster disastrous conditions,”scmp.com, February 26, 2014