你们讨论中国的忽略了个基本问题# Stock
B*e
1 楼
就是中国土壤污染问题严重，每天吃饭相当于慢性中毒，这个基本问题不解决剩下的都
是浮云。
The bad earth:The most neglected threat to public health in China is toxic
soil
And fixing it will be hard and costly
Print edition | Briefing
Jun 8th 2017 | SHIQIAO, HUNAN PROVINCE
TANG DONGHUA, a wiry 47-year-old farmer wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt, smokes
a cigarette and gesticulates towards his paddy fields in the hills of
southern Hunan province. The leaves of his rice plants poke about a foot
above water. Mr Tang says he expects to harvest about one tonne of rice from
his plot of a third of a hectare (0.8 acres) near the small village of
Shiqiao. There is just one problem: the crop will be poisoned.
Egrets and damselflies chomp lazily on fish and insects in the humid valley
below the paddy fields. But just beyond this rural scene lurks something
discordant. Mr Tang points to a chimney around 2km away that belches forth
white smoke. It belongs to the smelting plant which he blames for bringing
pollution into the valley. Cadmium is released during the smelting of ores
of iron, lead and copper. It is a heavy metal. If ingested, the liver and
kidneys cannot get rid of it from the body, so it accumulates, causing joint
and bone disease and, sometimes, cancer.
Hunan province is the country’s largest producer of rice—and of cadmium.
The local environmental-protection agency took samples of Mr Tang’s rice
this year and found it contained 50% more cadmium than allowed under Chinese
law (whose limits are close to international norms). Yet there are no
limits on planting rice in polluted areas in the region, so Mr Tang and his
neighbours sell their tainted rice to the local milling company which
distributes it throughout southern China. Mr Tang has sued the smelter for
polluting his land—a brave act in China, where courts regularly rule in
favour of well-connected businesses. His is an extreme case of soil
contamination, one of the largest and most neglected problems in the country.
Soil contamination occurs in most countries with a lot of farmland, heavy
industry and mining. In Ukraine, for example, which has all three, about 8%
of the land is contaminated. A chemical dump in upstate New York called Love
Canal resulted in the poisoning of many residents and the creation of the
“superfund”, a federal programme to clean up contaminated soil. But the
biggest problems occur in China, the world’s largest producer of food and
of heavy industrial commodities such as steel and cement.
China’s smog is notorious. Its concentrations of pollutants—ten or more
times the World Health Organisation’s maximum safe level—have put clean
air high on the political agenda and led the government to curtail the
production and use of coal. Water pollution does not spark as much popular
outrage but commands the attention of elites. Wen Jiabao, a former prime
minister, once said that water problems threaten “the very survival of the
Chinese nation”. China has a vast scheme to divert water from its damp
southern provinces to the arid north.
Dishing the dirt
Soil pollution, in contrast, is buried: a poisoned field can look as green
and fertile as a healthy one. It is also intractable. With enough effort, it
is possible to reduce air or water pollution, though it may take years or
decades. By contrast, toxins remain in the soil for centuries, and are
hugely expensive to eradicate. It took 21 years and the removal of 1,200
cubic metres of soil to clean up the Love Canal, a site covering just 6.5
hectares.
China’s soil contamination is so great that it cannot adopt such a course (
see map). The country is unusual in that it not only has many brownfield
sites (contaminated areas near cities that were once used for industry) but
large amounts of polluted farmland, too. In 2014 the government published a
national soil survey which showed that 16.1% of all soil and 19.4% of
farmland was contaminated by organic and inorganic chemical pollutants and
by metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic. That amounts to roughly 250,000
square kilometres of contaminated soil, equivalent to the arable farmland
of Mexico. Cadmium and arsenic were found in 40% of the affected land.
Officials say that 35,000 square kilometres of farmland is so polluted that
no agriculture should be allowed on it at all.
Stick in the mud
This survey is controversial. Carried out in 2005-13, it was at first
classified as a state secret, leading environmentalists to fear that the
contamination might be even worse than the government let on. Not everyone,
however, is as pessimistic. Chen Tongbin, head of the Institute of
Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing, thinks the
figure of 19.4% is too high. Based on local studies, he says 10% is nearer
the mark. Even that would be a worrying figure, given that China is trying
to feed a fifth of the world’s population on a tenth of the world’s arable
land. The conclusion seems to be that China’s soil pollution is widespread
and that information about it is disturbingly unreliable.
There are three reasons why the contamination is so extensive. First, China
’s chemical and fertiliser industries were poorly regulated for decades and
the soil still stores the waste that was dumped on it for so many years. In
2015, for example, 10,000 tonnes of toxic waste was discovered under a pig
farm in Jiangsu province in the east of China after a businessman proposed
plans to build a warehouse on the plot and tested the soil. In 2004
construction workers on the Beijing metro suddenly fell ill when they
started tunnelling under a site previously occupied by a pesticide factory.
New environmental regulations have sought to crack down on chemical dumping
but they do not seem to do enough. Since 2008 new plants have had to be
built in special chemical-industry parks, where oversight is supposed to be
stricter. At the end of May, Greenpeace, an environmental NGO, took samples
from the wastewater, soil and air of one such park, in Lianyungang in
Jiangsu. It discovered 226 different chemicals. Three-quarters of them are
not subject to hazardous-chemical regulations in China, 16 are definitely or
probably carcinogenic to humans and three are illegal.
Making matters worse is the astonishing “safety” record of the chemical
industry. Between January and August 2016, China suffered 232 accidents in
chemical factories, such as leaks, fires and explosions—almost one a day.
Since around a fifth of these factories are in China’s most productive
agricultural areas or near rivers used for irrigation, many of the spilled
chemicals end up in fields. Chemical factories are not the only culprits.
About 150km from Mr Tang’s village, in a town called Chenzhou, part of a
lead and zinc mine collapsed in 1985, flooding nearby farms with arsenic, a
by-product of mining. Arsenic concentrations in the soil were 24 times the
legal limit 30 years later.
The second big problem is that land is being poisoned by “sewage irrigation
”. Wastewater and industrial effluent are used in increasing amounts for
irrigation because there is not enough fresh water to go round. In the north
of China there is less water available per person than in Saudi Arabia, so
farmers use whatever they can get. China produces over 60bn tonnes of sewage
a year and in rural areas only 10% of it is treated. Most of the sludge
goes into lakes and rivers, and thence onto fields.
A study in 2014 found that 39 out of 55 areas using sewage irrigation were
contaminated by cadmium, arsenic and other poisons and that the accumulation
of heavy metals in intensively irrigated areas was rising. An earlier study
from 2010 found that water along 18% of the length of China’s rivers was
too polluted for use in agriculture. It is used anyway.
To make matters worse, the soil is bearing the burden of the excess use of
fertiliser and pesticide, which has increased as China’s demand for grain
has risen. Since 1991 pesticide use has more than doubled and the country
now uses roughly twice as much per hectare as the worldwide average.
Fertiliser use has almost doubled, too. In 2012 a survey by the Institution
of Nutrition and Food Safety reported that in 16 provinces 65 pesticides
were detected in food, though whether this was the result of overuse by
farmers, illegal dumping by factories or some other reason is not clear. The
most common pesticides were present in all the main foodstuffs.
Third, soil pollution is affecting more people than it used to because of
economic change and urbanisation. Twenty years ago, most chemical and
pesticide plants were built far from cities and although their pollution
hurt soil, crops and farmers, it did not directly affect city dwellers.
Since then, China has experienced the largest urban expansion the world has
ever seen and once-remote factories are now surrounded by houses and shops.
As the economy switches from heavy industry to services, many factories are
closing down or relocating.
Covering a lot of ground
A case in Changzhou in Jiangsu province showed what can happen next. In
early 2016 students at a newly opened campus of the Changzhou Foreign
Language School began complaining of headaches, skin rashes and a strange
smell. Hundreds fell ill, some with lymphoma. The campus, it turned out, had
been built next to a dump owned by three chemical companies that had closed
in 2010.
The land had been acquired by the local government and cleaned up by a
specialist firm that spread a heavy layer of clay over the top. Alas, the
clay leaked. A survey in 2012 found that levels of chlorobenzene, a solvent,
were 80,000 times the permitted limit. In May 2016 two NGOs took the
chemical companies to court, blaming them for the pollution. The court threw
the case out, leaving the plaintiffs with huge costs. As in so many cases,
the pollution had been buried for decades but was unearthed by economic
change.
The harm caused by soil pollution is as grave as might be expected. Heavy
metals are exceptionally bad for food safety and human health. In 2002 China
’s ministry of agriculture conducted one of the few nationwide food tests
to look for such heavy metals; it found that 28% of the rice samples it took
had excess lead and 10% had excess cadmium.
In 2015 a survey by Yonglong Lu of the Research Centre for Eco-Environmental
Sciences in Beijing and others in Environment International, a scientific
journal, counted hepatitis A, typhoid and cancers of the digestive tract
among the health hazards of eating contaminated food. The authors also
suggested that there may be a link between soil pollution and China’s “
cancer villages”, 400-450 clusters with unusually high levels of liver,
lung, oesophageal and gastric cancers. In 2006 a Chinese environmental NGO
took urine samples from 500 residents of Zhuzhou, an area of Hunan province
with several such villages; 30% of those tested showed elevated levels of
cadmium and 10% needed specialist treatment.
That alone should have rung alarm bells for China’s rulers. In addition,
several other effects are pushing the problem of polluted soil slowly up the
ladder of political concerns. Politicians are becoming increasingly
concerned about public opinion. Alarm at reports of cadmium rice and other
contaminated foods is growing. Nor do local governments want a repeat of the
Changzhou case, which became a public controversy last year.
The law of sod
Politicians also worry about the impact that contamination has on
agricultural yields. Poisoned soils are less productive. The ministry of
environmental protection said in 2006 that grain yields had fallen by 10m
tonnes as a result of soil contamination. It did not specify what period
this referred to but in 2006, China’s total grain output was just under
500m tonnes, so pollution could have reduced the harvest by 2% below what it
might otherwise have been. With the total amount of arable land falling as
a result of urbanization and soil erosion (see chart), China cannot afford
to contaminate what is left. The national government is obsessed with
feeding China’s 1.3bn people and anything that reduces grain yields is a
matter of concern.
Lastly, soil contamination adds to the difficulties that local governments
face in acquiring land to build on. A large part of local-government finance
depends on officials taking over land on the edge of cities (sometimes
forcibly) and leasing it to property developers who build the new houses and
offices that China requires. Without this moneymaking activity, many
provincial and county governments would go bankrupt. In 2014 a working group
of the Communist Party revealed that 12 provinces had run out of land for
construction. So when contamination reduces the amount of land for leasing
or forces cities to build on polluted brownfields, it hurts local
governments.
As a result, the attitude of authorities—especially the national government
—has begun to shift from indifference to concern. In 2011 the environment
ministry announced a five-year plan to cut heavy-metal emissions in the
worst-affected areas by 15% from what they were in 2007 by the end of 2015.
It said that three-quarters of the targets had been met by the end of 2014.
That year the legislature stiffened penalties for polluters. Last year the
national government issued a ten-point plan that aims to make 90% of
contaminated farmland safe by 2020, defines different soil types and lays
out steps to be taken to stabilize soil quality for each one. This year the
legislature has said it will clarify who is responsible for soil pollution
in the past and codify into Chinese law the “polluter pays” principle.
This spate of rulemaking is welcome, but it is only a start. As in many
countries, health, food safety, water pollution and soil contamination are
all dealt with in China by different regulatory agencies, which do not
always co-operate. There has been no nationwide health survey to track the
effect of soil contamination. And most of the soil-improvement plans lack
teeth because they depend for enforcement on local officials, who are often
in cahoots with the local polluters.
Efforts to clean up polluted soil have so far been modest because, without a
proper law, it is not clear who should pay for them. China has nothing like
America’s “superfund”. Nor could it afford to eradicate contaminants
entirely by, say, washing the soil and treating it with bacteria. London did
this when preparing the site, formerly an industrial area, for the 2012
Olympic games: it cost £3,000 ($3,900) per cubic metre. Cleaning China
’s 250,000 square kilometers to the depth of one metre to the same squeaky-
clean standard would in theory cost $1,000 trillion—more than all the
wealth in the world. Even a less thorough clean up would cost more than
China could afford.
Instead, the country has piecemeal projects. It has tested a method of using
chemicals to fix heavy metals in the soil but the results have been
disappointing. Researchers also worry about controlling pollution by adding
more chemicals. To reduce rice contamination, plant scientists have bred a
hybrid variety that absorbs less cadmium. Mr Tang was offered some but
rejected it because the yield was low.
The Chinese have experimented with growing willow trees, which absorb
cadmium, and poplars, which do the same for lead, to clean up its fields.
This works—but the fields cannot be used for crops in the meantime.
Typically the treatment of poisoned brownfields consists of spreading layers
of clay or concrete over the affected areas, as happened in Changzhou, but
this often just pollutes the water table beneath. Gao Shengda, the secretary
of the China Environmental Remediation Industry Association, admits that
the country lacks the experience and technical skills to stabilize its
polluted soils.
Serf and turf
At the end of May Mr Tang’s case came to court. The judge found that the
pollution was indeed leaking from the industrial site. He admitted the
fields were polluted. But he said that Mr Tang had not proved that one had
caused the other and threw out the case. Mr Tang has launched an appeal.
While he waits, he and his neighbours trudge back daily to their fields to
look after the poisoned rice, which is almost ready for harvest.
是浮云。
The bad earth:The most neglected threat to public health in China is toxic
soil
And fixing it will be hard and costly
Print edition | Briefing
Jun 8th 2017 | SHIQIAO, HUNAN PROVINCE
TANG DONGHUA, a wiry 47-year-old farmer wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt, smokes
a cigarette and gesticulates towards his paddy fields in the hills of
southern Hunan province. The leaves of his rice plants poke about a foot
above water. Mr Tang says he expects to harvest about one tonne of rice from
his plot of a third of a hectare (0.8 acres) near the small village of
Shiqiao. There is just one problem: the crop will be poisoned.
Egrets and damselflies chomp lazily on fish and insects in the humid valley
below the paddy fields. But just beyond this rural scene lurks something
discordant. Mr Tang points to a chimney around 2km away that belches forth
white smoke. It belongs to the smelting plant which he blames for bringing
pollution into the valley. Cadmium is released during the smelting of ores
of iron, lead and copper. It is a heavy metal. If ingested, the liver and
kidneys cannot get rid of it from the body, so it accumulates, causing joint
and bone disease and, sometimes, cancer.
Hunan province is the country’s largest producer of rice—and of cadmium.
The local environmental-protection agency took samples of Mr Tang’s rice
this year and found it contained 50% more cadmium than allowed under Chinese
law (whose limits are close to international norms). Yet there are no
limits on planting rice in polluted areas in the region, so Mr Tang and his
neighbours sell their tainted rice to the local milling company which
distributes it throughout southern China. Mr Tang has sued the smelter for
polluting his land—a brave act in China, where courts regularly rule in
favour of well-connected businesses. His is an extreme case of soil
contamination, one of the largest and most neglected problems in the country.
Soil contamination occurs in most countries with a lot of farmland, heavy
industry and mining. In Ukraine, for example, which has all three, about 8%
of the land is contaminated. A chemical dump in upstate New York called Love
Canal resulted in the poisoning of many residents and the creation of the
“superfund”, a federal programme to clean up contaminated soil. But the
biggest problems occur in China, the world’s largest producer of food and
of heavy industrial commodities such as steel and cement.
China’s smog is notorious. Its concentrations of pollutants—ten or more
times the World Health Organisation’s maximum safe level—have put clean
air high on the political agenda and led the government to curtail the
production and use of coal. Water pollution does not spark as much popular
outrage but commands the attention of elites. Wen Jiabao, a former prime
minister, once said that water problems threaten “the very survival of the
Chinese nation”. China has a vast scheme to divert water from its damp
southern provinces to the arid north.
Dishing the dirt
Soil pollution, in contrast, is buried: a poisoned field can look as green
and fertile as a healthy one. It is also intractable. With enough effort, it
is possible to reduce air or water pollution, though it may take years or
decades. By contrast, toxins remain in the soil for centuries, and are
hugely expensive to eradicate. It took 21 years and the removal of 1,200
cubic metres of soil to clean up the Love Canal, a site covering just 6.5
hectares.
China’s soil contamination is so great that it cannot adopt such a course (
see map). The country is unusual in that it not only has many brownfield
sites (contaminated areas near cities that were once used for industry) but
large amounts of polluted farmland, too. In 2014 the government published a
national soil survey which showed that 16.1% of all soil and 19.4% of
farmland was contaminated by organic and inorganic chemical pollutants and
by metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic. That amounts to roughly 250,000
square kilometres of contaminated soil, equivalent to the arable farmland
of Mexico. Cadmium and arsenic were found in 40% of the affected land.
Officials say that 35,000 square kilometres of farmland is so polluted that
no agriculture should be allowed on it at all.
Stick in the mud
This survey is controversial. Carried out in 2005-13, it was at first
classified as a state secret, leading environmentalists to fear that the
contamination might be even worse than the government let on. Not everyone,
however, is as pessimistic. Chen Tongbin, head of the Institute of
Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing, thinks the
figure of 19.4% is too high. Based on local studies, he says 10% is nearer
the mark. Even that would be a worrying figure, given that China is trying
to feed a fifth of the world’s population on a tenth of the world’s arable
land. The conclusion seems to be that China’s soil pollution is widespread
and that information about it is disturbingly unreliable.
There are three reasons why the contamination is so extensive. First, China
’s chemical and fertiliser industries were poorly regulated for decades and
the soil still stores the waste that was dumped on it for so many years. In
2015, for example, 10,000 tonnes of toxic waste was discovered under a pig
farm in Jiangsu province in the east of China after a businessman proposed
plans to build a warehouse on the plot and tested the soil. In 2004
construction workers on the Beijing metro suddenly fell ill when they
started tunnelling under a site previously occupied by a pesticide factory.
New environmental regulations have sought to crack down on chemical dumping
but they do not seem to do enough. Since 2008 new plants have had to be
built in special chemical-industry parks, where oversight is supposed to be
stricter. At the end of May, Greenpeace, an environmental NGO, took samples
from the wastewater, soil and air of one such park, in Lianyungang in
Jiangsu. It discovered 226 different chemicals. Three-quarters of them are
not subject to hazardous-chemical regulations in China, 16 are definitely or
probably carcinogenic to humans and three are illegal.
Making matters worse is the astonishing “safety” record of the chemical
industry. Between January and August 2016, China suffered 232 accidents in
chemical factories, such as leaks, fires and explosions—almost one a day.
Since around a fifth of these factories are in China’s most productive
agricultural areas or near rivers used for irrigation, many of the spilled
chemicals end up in fields. Chemical factories are not the only culprits.
About 150km from Mr Tang’s village, in a town called Chenzhou, part of a
lead and zinc mine collapsed in 1985, flooding nearby farms with arsenic, a
by-product of mining. Arsenic concentrations in the soil were 24 times the
legal limit 30 years later.
The second big problem is that land is being poisoned by “sewage irrigation
”. Wastewater and industrial effluent are used in increasing amounts for
irrigation because there is not enough fresh water to go round. In the north
of China there is less water available per person than in Saudi Arabia, so
farmers use whatever they can get. China produces over 60bn tonnes of sewage
a year and in rural areas only 10% of it is treated. Most of the sludge
goes into lakes and rivers, and thence onto fields.
A study in 2014 found that 39 out of 55 areas using sewage irrigation were
contaminated by cadmium, arsenic and other poisons and that the accumulation
of heavy metals in intensively irrigated areas was rising. An earlier study
from 2010 found that water along 18% of the length of China’s rivers was
too polluted for use in agriculture. It is used anyway.
To make matters worse, the soil is bearing the burden of the excess use of
fertiliser and pesticide, which has increased as China’s demand for grain
has risen. Since 1991 pesticide use has more than doubled and the country
now uses roughly twice as much per hectare as the worldwide average.
Fertiliser use has almost doubled, too. In 2012 a survey by the Institution
of Nutrition and Food Safety reported that in 16 provinces 65 pesticides
were detected in food, though whether this was the result of overuse by
farmers, illegal dumping by factories or some other reason is not clear. The
most common pesticides were present in all the main foodstuffs.
Third, soil pollution is affecting more people than it used to because of
economic change and urbanisation. Twenty years ago, most chemical and
pesticide plants were built far from cities and although their pollution
hurt soil, crops and farmers, it did not directly affect city dwellers.
Since then, China has experienced the largest urban expansion the world has
ever seen and once-remote factories are now surrounded by houses and shops.
As the economy switches from heavy industry to services, many factories are
closing down or relocating.
Covering a lot of ground
A case in Changzhou in Jiangsu province showed what can happen next. In
early 2016 students at a newly opened campus of the Changzhou Foreign
Language School began complaining of headaches, skin rashes and a strange
smell. Hundreds fell ill, some with lymphoma. The campus, it turned out, had
been built next to a dump owned by three chemical companies that had closed
in 2010.
The land had been acquired by the local government and cleaned up by a
specialist firm that spread a heavy layer of clay over the top. Alas, the
clay leaked. A survey in 2012 found that levels of chlorobenzene, a solvent,
were 80,000 times the permitted limit. In May 2016 two NGOs took the
chemical companies to court, blaming them for the pollution. The court threw
the case out, leaving the plaintiffs with huge costs. As in so many cases,
the pollution had been buried for decades but was unearthed by economic
change.
The harm caused by soil pollution is as grave as might be expected. Heavy
metals are exceptionally bad for food safety and human health. In 2002 China
’s ministry of agriculture conducted one of the few nationwide food tests
to look for such heavy metals; it found that 28% of the rice samples it took
had excess lead and 10% had excess cadmium.
In 2015 a survey by Yonglong Lu of the Research Centre for Eco-Environmental
Sciences in Beijing and others in Environment International, a scientific
journal, counted hepatitis A, typhoid and cancers of the digestive tract
among the health hazards of eating contaminated food. The authors also
suggested that there may be a link between soil pollution and China’s “
cancer villages”, 400-450 clusters with unusually high levels of liver,
lung, oesophageal and gastric cancers. In 2006 a Chinese environmental NGO
took urine samples from 500 residents of Zhuzhou, an area of Hunan province
with several such villages; 30% of those tested showed elevated levels of
cadmium and 10% needed specialist treatment.
That alone should have rung alarm bells for China’s rulers. In addition,
several other effects are pushing the problem of polluted soil slowly up the
ladder of political concerns. Politicians are becoming increasingly
concerned about public opinion. Alarm at reports of cadmium rice and other
contaminated foods is growing. Nor do local governments want a repeat of the
Changzhou case, which became a public controversy last year.
The law of sod
Politicians also worry about the impact that contamination has on
agricultural yields. Poisoned soils are less productive. The ministry of
environmental protection said in 2006 that grain yields had fallen by 10m
tonnes as a result of soil contamination. It did not specify what period
this referred to but in 2006, China’s total grain output was just under
500m tonnes, so pollution could have reduced the harvest by 2% below what it
might otherwise have been. With the total amount of arable land falling as
a result of urbanization and soil erosion (see chart), China cannot afford
to contaminate what is left. The national government is obsessed with
feeding China’s 1.3bn people and anything that reduces grain yields is a
matter of concern.
Lastly, soil contamination adds to the difficulties that local governments
face in acquiring land to build on. A large part of local-government finance
depends on officials taking over land on the edge of cities (sometimes
forcibly) and leasing it to property developers who build the new houses and
offices that China requires. Without this moneymaking activity, many
provincial and county governments would go bankrupt. In 2014 a working group
of the Communist Party revealed that 12 provinces had run out of land for
construction. So when contamination reduces the amount of land for leasing
or forces cities to build on polluted brownfields, it hurts local
governments.
As a result, the attitude of authorities—especially the national government
—has begun to shift from indifference to concern. In 2011 the environment
ministry announced a five-year plan to cut heavy-metal emissions in the
worst-affected areas by 15% from what they were in 2007 by the end of 2015.
It said that three-quarters of the targets had been met by the end of 2014.
That year the legislature stiffened penalties for polluters. Last year the
national government issued a ten-point plan that aims to make 90% of
contaminated farmland safe by 2020, defines different soil types and lays
out steps to be taken to stabilize soil quality for each one. This year the
legislature has said it will clarify who is responsible for soil pollution
in the past and codify into Chinese law the “polluter pays” principle.
This spate of rulemaking is welcome, but it is only a start. As in many
countries, health, food safety, water pollution and soil contamination are
all dealt with in China by different regulatory agencies, which do not
always co-operate. There has been no nationwide health survey to track the
effect of soil contamination. And most of the soil-improvement plans lack
teeth because they depend for enforcement on local officials, who are often
in cahoots with the local polluters.
Efforts to clean up polluted soil have so far been modest because, without a
proper law, it is not clear who should pay for them. China has nothing like
America’s “superfund”. Nor could it afford to eradicate contaminants
entirely by, say, washing the soil and treating it with bacteria. London did
this when preparing the site, formerly an industrial area, for the 2012
Olympic games: it cost £3,000 ($3,900) per cubic metre. Cleaning China
’s 250,000 square kilometers to the depth of one metre to the same squeaky-
clean standard would in theory cost $1,000 trillion—more than all the
wealth in the world. Even a less thorough clean up would cost more than
China could afford.
Instead, the country has piecemeal projects. It has tested a method of using
chemicals to fix heavy metals in the soil but the results have been
disappointing. Researchers also worry about controlling pollution by adding
more chemicals. To reduce rice contamination, plant scientists have bred a
hybrid variety that absorbs less cadmium. Mr Tang was offered some but
rejected it because the yield was low.
The Chinese have experimented with growing willow trees, which absorb
cadmium, and poplars, which do the same for lead, to clean up its fields.
This works—but the fields cannot be used for crops in the meantime.
Typically the treatment of poisoned brownfields consists of spreading layers
of clay or concrete over the affected areas, as happened in Changzhou, but
this often just pollutes the water table beneath. Gao Shengda, the secretary
of the China Environmental Remediation Industry Association, admits that
the country lacks the experience and technical skills to stabilize its
polluted soils.
Serf and turf
At the end of May Mr Tang’s case came to court. The judge found that the
pollution was indeed leaking from the industrial site. He admitted the
fields were polluted. But he said that Mr Tang had not proved that one had
caused the other and threw out the case. Mr Tang has launched an appeal.
While he waits, he and his neighbours trudge back daily to their fields to
look after the poisoned rice, which is almost ready for harvest.
