Pollution devastates rural areas, threatens farmland
Official says improper sewage treatment, high rate of fertiliser waste risks agricultural land
Rural China has paid a high ecological price for the government's decades-long drive to boost food production, leaving fields and waterways across the country severely polluted, a top environmental official said yesterday.
Zhuang Guotai, the Ministry of Environmental Protection's director of nature and ecology conservation, said the accumulation of fertiliser, pesticides and animal waste - as well governments' neglect of sewage treatment - threatened the country's vital agricultural land.
His remarks came at a press conference marking the publication of the annual "Analysis and Forecast on China's Rural Economy Report", compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the National Bureau of Statistics.
Zhuang said that most of the nine billion tonnes of sewage and 280 million tonnes of rubbish produced annually by rural communities went untreated because few of the country's 600,000 villages had appropriate facilities.
"Sewage is expected to evaporate and garbage to be blown away by the wind," he said, citing a popular saying.
The report faulted China's farms for using 318kg of fertiliser per hectare - more than 2½ times the world average.
It noted that China was producing less food than more developed countries on a per capita basis: one hectare of farmland yielded 5.5 tonnes of cereal in 2010, which was 20 per cent lower than typical yields in Britain, France, Germany and the United States.
