China could lose millions of hectares of farmland to pollution

Agriculture official says land could be taken out of production because of severe heavy metal pollution
Jennifer Duggan theguardian.com 23 Jan 14;

Millions of hectares of agricultural land in China could be withdrawn from production because of severe heavy-metal pollution, according to a Chinese agriculture official.

Chex Xiwen, the deputy director of China’s top agricultural authority said that farmland near rivers, especially which are sources of drinking water, will also be taken out of production if there is a risk of pollution from the use of fertilisers and pesticides.

The warning follows comments by the vice minister of land and resources in December, who said that an estimated 3.3 million hectares of land is polluted, most of which is in regions that produce grain.

Withdrawing so much farmland from production could have an impact on food security, an issue that has been highlighted in the first government policy document of the year. The No 1 Central Document, issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, stressed the need for improvement of the national food security system and said that China will begin pilot programmes for restoring contaminated farmland this year.

The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that 3.3m hectares of arable land is contaminated and said that farming on land almost the size of Belgium has been stopped so that the can can be “rehabilitated”. The vice minister of land and resources, Wang Shiyuan, said that much of the contaminated land is in grain-producing areas.

According to state media this accounts for approximately 2% of China’s total farmland. The environmental protection ministry has estimated that 12 million tonnes of grain are polluted by heavy metals every year.

Concerns among the Chinese public have been growing in recent years over the extent of soil pollution caused by overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and contamination by heavy metals from industry. While soil pollution is more difficult to verify and tackle than other forms of pollution, there have been frequent reports of incidents. In May 2013, it was reported that rice grown in China’s central Hunan province was found to be contaminated with cadmium.

Soil pollution such as air and water pollution is becoming more widely discussed and there is increasingly more open debate within state media. Earlier this month, the 21st Century Business Herald, a business newspaper in China, called for a database on soil pollution to be made public and said that people had been “kept in the dark about the serious health threat for too long.”