Rising health fears over China's farmed seafood

Straits Times 17 Dec 07;

FUQING (CHINA) - DOZENS of enormous ponds filled with murky water and teeming with eels, shrimp and tilapia - much of it destined for markets in Japan and the West - lie at the foot of mountains in Fujian province.

Fuqing city, in south-eastern China's Fujian province, is one of the centres of a booming industry that over two decades has transformed the country into the biggest producer and exporter of seafood in the world, and the fastest-growing supplier to the United States.

But that growth is threatened by two environmental problems: acute water shortages and water supplies contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural run-off that includes pesticides.

The fish farms, in turn, are discharging waste water that further pollutes the water supply.

'There are simply too many aquaculture farms in this area. They're all discharging water here, fouling up other farms,' said Mr Ye Chao, an eel and shrimp farmer who has 20 giant ponds in western Fuqing.

Farmers have coped with the toxic waters by mixing illegal veterinary drugs and pesticides into fish feed. This keeps their stock alive, but leaves poisonous and carcinogenic residues posing health threats to consumers.

In recent years, the European Union and Japan have imposed temporary bans on Chinese seafood because of illegal drug residues.

The US blocked imports of several types of fish this year after inspectors detected traces of illegal drugs linked to cancer.

Last week, officials from the US and China signed an agreement in Beijing to improve oversight of Chinese fish farms as part of a larger deal on food and drug safety.

Fuqing is at the top of the list this year for rejected shipments of seafood, with 43 rejections to the end of last month, according to records kept by the US Food and Drug Administration. All of those rejections involved the use of illegal veterinary drugs.

By comparison, Thailand, also a major exporter of seafood to the US, had only two refusals related to illegal veterinary drugs.

Overall, China had 210 refusals for illegal drugs.

'For 50 years,' said Professor Wang Wu at Shanghai Fisheries University, 'we've blindly emphasised economic growth... and now we can see that the water turns dirty and the seafood gets dangerous.'

China began emerging as a seafood power in the 1990s as rapid economic growth became the top priority in the country.

China produced about 52 million tonnes of farmed seafood last year. The country produces about 70 per cent of the farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend along its entire eastern seaboard.

In the 1980s, thousands of peasants struggling to earn a living began carving up huge plots, digging rectangular pits and filling them with water to create fish ponds.

As early as the mid-1990s, though, serious environmental problems began to emerge.

After electronics and textile manufacturing plants moved into central Fuqing, the south-eastern part of the city suffered water shortages, and some fish farmers say the water turned black.

The government this year rated large sections of the Long River, the major waterway in Fuqing, unfit for fish farming, swimming or even contact with the human body.

Said Professor An Taicheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: 'China has to go to the sea because it's getting harder and harder to find clean water. One day, no one will dare to eat fish from dirty water, and what will farmers do?'