8 Million Acres of China's Farmland is Too Polluted to Farm

According to a single Chinese official, 8 million acres of farmland in China are too polluted for farming.

Stories of rice contaminated with high levels of cadmium are mentioned also.

Other researchers say that as much as 70% of soil has problems.

They say they are spending big money to rehabilitate contaminated land and underground water supplies.

Industrial growth seems to be the reason.

About 3.33 million hectares (8 million acres) of China's farmland is too polluted to grow crops, a government official said on Monday, highlighting the risk facing agriculture after three decades of rapid industrial growth.

China has been under pressure to improve its urban environment following a spate of pollution scares.

But cleaning up rural regions could be an even bigger challenge as the government tries to reverse damage done by years of urban and industrial encroachment and ensure food supplies for a growing population. .....


How uncomforting! The cleanup bill for air pollution alone is $290 billion. Give that State TV amazingly promotes the "Benefits of Smog" one has to wonder how many acres of China's farmland are really polluted, and what a proper cleanup job would actually cost.

8 Million Acres of China's Farmland is Too Polluted to Farm; All Farm Products From China Suspect

With Six, you get Egg Roll

Analyze This !!

Since having personal experience with their animal food and reading about toy recalls from lead and other harmful ingredients, I'm hesitant to purchase anything from China.

The big problem is, components can be purchased from them, assembled in the US and then relabeled.

You just don't know who or what to trust anymore.

reply to post by xuenchen


Last I heard the Superfund cleanup sites here were a total joke. Any news on soil pollution in North America? Thinkin' 'bout those cadmium dispersal experiments back in the 1950's for starters...

The biologic half-life of cadmium in the kidney is estimated to be between 6 to 38 years; the half life of cadmium in the liver is between 4 and 19 years (ATSDR 1999). These long half-lives reflect the fact that humans do not have effective pathways for cadmium elimination. Cadmium has no known biologic function in humans. Bioaccumulation appears to be a by-product of increasing industrialization.

reply to post by xuenchen


I guess the short question is, is there anything about China that is not polluted ?

Following the pattern of the USSR. When the state runs everything, then no one much cares if it's run clean.

Remember the melamine in the pet food? Everyone was mad because there was no mechanism to test for it in place at the US manufacturers. The reason was because people would have to be mad to put melamine anywhere near food ... unless you're Chinese. My husband has some familiarity with Chinese QC procedures, and they're a joke and things there are only as safe as someone feels like making them. There is no impetus to care if the container you use to ship grain was recently used to ship melamine for example.

The state is the business and the business is the state and so long as you follow the strict letter of what you're supposed to do, it's best not to get too curious about anything else. Someone could die for it, including you.

reply to post by xuenchen


Great and now they are exporting chicken to us????

It seems that the Power in China went astray. If they pollute much of their land they will be dependent on other nations for their food to feed their people. Someone will get power over them. I thought the Chinese were smarter than that, they aren't even getting rich off of this. They still have accumulated a lot of debt.

I don't understand the logic of the world. Destroy your ability to live just to look good on paper or to build yourself into a superpower so you become a threat to another superpower. I know Chinese people, they are good people yet they are run by some power hungry people who have been BSed into believing they must destroy themselves to gain power. That is bad behavior. They should get in line behind the leaders of the USA and Russia to get their spanking.

The USA let big corporations get away with this in the past. Then the taxpayer, who barely benefited at all from the polluting, had to pay for the cleanup. Remember, the consumer always pays one way or another.

Guys....
we WILL all burn.

reply to post by ketsuko


Well the State doesn't actually run everything, not in the way Americans think of it anyway. What the State does there, is exactly what it does here only without the environmental and labor regulations, something they are realizing over there as we did over here, is not possible without offing ourselves in the process. The State there lets business, especially American business do whatever the hell it wants to keep production cost down. Exploit the land, exploit the labor, who cares? Look at the profit margins! We have to learn as a race that we can't just ignore the costs of production that we don't like. Land, water and people are finite resources. The profit margins are artificial at the level of big business because they don't factor in these things. True Liberty can only exist when we disallow exploitation.

So that is why the Chinese are buying up land in Australia, Africa, possibly north and south America, makes sense now.
I presume all the 'ghost' cities are built on unpolluted land, is there is any.

Problem is, we have to watch what we consume NOW.

The soil has been contaminated for years if not decades, and then water has been too. Look the labels on every package from the store to be sure it's not from China. I was just telling someone about the horrors of frozen fish from China and how polluted the waters are. That is just the frozen fish. I can only imagine what comes from the ground but I am glad to see they are conducting studies on the soil over there. God knows what they allowed to get exported.

Keep your eyes peeled people. Don't buy food from China.

There is an author who travelled extensively in China ,in the mid nineties. He took a series of photos of rural farms and such.
He went back in the mid 2000's and shot photos from the same sites and instead of farms, mountains of trash as far as the eye can see. Instead of a scene of people farming it's scenes of people scavenging garbage.