Pesticides bring a silent spring Updated: 2011-10-19 07:51 By Yang Wanli (China Daily) http://www.china.org.cn/environment/2011-10/19/content_23664425.htm Print Mail Large Medium Small 0 Fan Jiude cares for the cucumbers in his greenhouse that bring in 40,000 to 50,000 yuan every year. Photos by Zou Hong / China Daily Top above: Fertilizers and other farm chemicals are available in this small store in Shouguang, Shandong. Above: A tester checks a Nanfan cucumber for chemical residue. According to protocols, he should be wearing gloves. Photos by Zou Hong / China Daily Overuse of chemicals in farming raises concerns about food on our table, Yang Wanli reports from Yunnan and Shandong provinces. It seems incredible that farmers would shun the vegetables they send to the cities. But that is the case in Xundian where 100 hectares of greenhouses provide vegetables for Kunming, about 50 kilometers away. Farmers next door will not eat them due to health concerns. "Chemicals and fertilizers are widely used. We have to use them to grow bigger and more beautiful vegetables to meet market demand," local farmer He Chengliang said. "But we only eat those grown in our courtyard without the use of chemicals. The variety may be limited but they are safe and healthy." It's not just that farmers use chemicals to control insects and boost the growth of plants and vegetables. It's that they are overusing them, far more than farmers in other countries. The government has taken steps to tackle the problem. It has banned or limited the use of highly toxic chemicals, and promoted better agricultural practices. The use of chemicals has been fed largely by economics. He, 54, has grown vegetables for more than 30 years in Southwest China's Yunnan province. Most villagers no longer raise livestock, he said, so they have no ready manure. Buying it costs more than chemical fertilizer, and without pesticides, farmers would need to hire more people to kill pests for smaller harvests. "Traditional ways of farming will raise the cost and can hardly meet the increasing demand from urban areas," He said. "If no chemicals are used, most urban people could not afford the vegetables." Not just in Yunnan Use of pesticides grew nationwide from about 700,000 tons in 1990 to 1.7 million tons (about 30 kg a hectare) in 2008, said Jiang Gaoming, an Institute of Botany researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Average use of pesticides per hectare in China is three to five times higher than in most other countries, according to a report by the National Business Daily in June. And nearly 90 million hectares of crops are polluted every year. Caijing magazine reported in September that the use of chemical fertilizer throughout China in the 1950s was 10,000 tons a year. By 2007, it was 51 million tons. Agriculture Vice-Minister Wei Chao'an said at a national conference in July that China's consumption of chemical fertilizer constitutes 35 percent of global market share, equal to the US and India combined. " We've got many problems . . . that will not only threaten our health, but also harm the farmland," Jiang said. Overuse of fertilizer "will cause the soil to pack together". It can kill earthworms and other organisms that aerate soil and contribute to fertility. 'Good business' Global sales of farm chemicals hit $45 billion in 2009 and are expected to reach $52 billion in 2014, according to the Freedonia Group, an international business research firm. China has become one of the biggest players - as both producer and consumer. In 2009, it made more than 2 million tons of farm chemicals, exporting 800,000 tons. Organic (synthetic) pesticides have been widely used worldwide since the 1940s and still take the major market share. Low-toxicity - and expensive - biological pesticides account for 1 percent of sales in China. Liu Xiulian, 54, has sold pesticides and chemical fertilizer in Zibo, East China's Shandong province, since 1996. She owns a family store covering about 20 square meters. Liu said pesticides sell well during the busy season, May to August, but the business supports her family of four year-round. "Every family is using farm chemicals. It's a good business," she said. "Compared with doing city jobs for 40 or 50 yuan a day, we don't need to go out while selling farm chemicals, which is easy and earns more." Strict limits "I don't think farm chemicals are as horrible as some people believe," said Pan Canping, director of the Agriculture Ministry's Quality Testing and Inspection Center for Agricultural Products. Severe insect and plant disease infestations afflict roughly 60 percent of cultivated land in China, Pan said. He estimated that farm chemicals save 58 million tons of grains, 1.5 tons of cotton, 50 million tons of vegetables and 6 million tons of fruit every year. Pan said Chinese agriculture is moving toward a healthier, environmentally friendly development. Use of highly toxic and hypertoxic agricultural chemicals is forbidden for insect control, and they cannot be applied to vegetables, melons, fruits, tea, and herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine. The regulations were issued by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1997. Farm chemicals must be registered before they can be sold. By the end of last year, the ministry had approved registration for 600 farm chemicals marketed under 14,000 brands. After evaluation by the ministry, changes in the "maximum use" labeling - sometimes allowing stronger solutions, sometimes weaker - were required for 200 chemicals. The ministry plans to regulate 7,000 other kinds of farm chemicals, completing those most commonly used, within five years. Important interval For modern agriculture, chemicals including fertilizers seem to be unavoidable not only in China but also in other countries. But their potential for harm can be mitigated by generally agreed-upon good agricultural practices (GAP). Practices vary by jurisdiction, but China's GAP took effect in May 2006. The principles are broadly outlined for the farm level in 10 areas, including crop and fodder production, harvest and on-farm processing and storage. The common theme is that all possible measures must be taken to prevent food-borne disease as fresh produce moves through production and distribution systems. For example: To extend their effectiveness, some pesticides contain chemicals that keep them from easily being washed away by rain. It takes time for those chemicals to break down into harmless compounds, so it's important to use minimal amounts and to allow sufficient time to elapse between the last application and harvest. "We called it the pre-harvest interval, which is an important part of GAP," said Pan, the quality testing and inspection director. "Only by following GAP strictly can we enjoy safe agriculture products." Pan said more than 96 percent of vegetables in China meet safety standards for chemical residue. Those that do not result from failure to follow GAP principles. "The problem not only exists in China, but also in advanced countries," he said. Daily tests Shouguang, in Shandong, is the "vegetable city" of China. About 60 percent of its cultivated land is devoted to growing vegetables, and it produces about 4 billion kg of them each year. It also has taken the lead in promoting safer farming by cracking down when tests show that residues of farm chemicals exceed 50 percent. Levels above that amount indicate that either too much was used or the chemicals were applied too close to harvest. "Almost all villages in Shouguang have a testing office and technicians will do the test every day," said Fan Quande, the Nanfan village chief. "If any hypertoxic chemicals are found on vegetables, the whole plastic greenhouse should be destroyed and farmers who grow those vegetables will be detained." In fact, he said, 10 greenhouses were destroyed and six farmers in the village were punished in the past two or three years. Nanfan village has about 400 families and each owns a greenhouse that covers about 1,000 square meters. Fan Jiude, 46, grows cucumbers that bring his family 40,000 to 50,000 yuan a year, he said. "In recent years, no highly toxic pesticides have been sold in the market and we dare not use them because of the severe punishment," he said. Fan, who has grown vegetables for more than 25 years, knows about other risks. "The hypertoxic pesticides are so strong that once I was poisoned in the greenhouse, just because I wiped away sweat after spraying without washing my hands. It made me throw up and I stayed in a hospital for three days." According to the most recent statistics available from the Ministry of Health, more than 17,000 pesticide poisoning cases in rural areas were reported in 2000, and more than 1,000 people died. About a quarter of the poisoning cases happened during farmwork. Leak in the system In Fan Jiude's greenhouse, some small plastic bags lay on the ground, empty containers for chemical fertilizer he uses to make his cucumbers grow larger. The instructions on the back of the bag said the contents should be diluted 1:15 - one part fertilizer to 15 parts water. Fan said he uses only 10 parts water. In the village's agricultural testing office, the man conducting the tests is supposed to wear gloves and use tweezers when he cuts rind from a cucumber to test for chemical residue. He had neither but, when prodded by the village chief, used scissors instead of tweezers. But he said he does wash containers after each sample is tested and uses distilled water - both parts of the protocol - so the results can be trusted. "That's where the problem is," said Jiang, the botany researcher. "Public sectors are speeding up to build a safe system, but the effect still lags behind. It takes time to educate farmers and to run the system well in the grassroots units." Sun Jingbo and Wang Jing contributed to this report.
Jiang Gaoming August 14, 2009 Recent studies show that food safety in China still needs improvement. Organic production is the answer, argues Jiang Gaoming. Here he explains how to make the shift. The new food-safety law allows consumers to claim up to 10 times the cost of a product in compensation if they discover it to be harmful, but consumers are unlikely to spend large amounts of money on third-party testing for the sake of a small reward. Related articles Organic food at a crossroads August 14, 2008 China encounters factory farming July 09, 2009 Food safety at a crossroads April 22, 2009 Environmental group Greenpeace recently tested vegetables purchased in supermarkets and markets in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou at a government-authorised independent laboratory in Qingdao. Traces of agricultural chemicals were found in 40 of the 45 samples that were tested, with a total of 50 different chemicals identified five of which are classified by the World Health Organisation as highly toxic. One strawberry bought at a Beijing Wal-Mart contained 13 different agricultural chemicals. This was not an isolated incident. Beijing Industrial and Commercial Bureau recently found levels of sulphites in seafood products produced by a well-known Hangzhou company that breached safety standards; a substandard batch of products has already been taken off the shelves. According to the National Business Daily , products from another four firms also failed to pass tests due to excessive levels of sulphites, sodium cyclamate, saccharin sodium and benzoic acid. In the past two years alone, we have witnessed scandals over tainted pork and melamine-contaminated milk . People have lost their faith in food; they can only ask what there is left to eat. To find chemicals in vegetables comes as no surprise, but the degree to which they were detected is shocking. And it is easy to identify these substances through testing, so how is it that they end up in the food chain? As a long-time observer of the food industry, I believe the following factors are to blame. First, producers are only that: they are producers. They do not consume their own products. Farmers do not eat the vegetables they grow; they are sold to others. Chicken and pig farmers do not eat the meat they produce; they buy more trustworthy products at the market. But what if everyone thought that way? There is a joke about a vegetable farmer and a pig farmer who eat together: the former only eats the pork, the latter prefers to stick to the vegetables. Farmers do not use chemicals and fertilisers on the foods they grow for their own consumption. Farmers would be too ashamed to use their farmed chickens to feed their guests; they only sell those birds to the cities. But if you live in a city, you do not have a choice. Second, higher quality products are more expensive to produce, and retailers are not interested. Agricultural authorities class products as organic, green, environmentally-friendly or standard; large differences in the cost of production are reflected in retail prices. A lack of oversight means that many products labelled organic or green are not what they purport to be. This means the costs are lower, but the profits are higher so plenty of retailers are willing to play along, including large supermarkets. Third, consumers cannot test products and can do nothing to control pesticide use. The new food-safety law allows consumers to claim up to 10 times the cost of a product in compensation if they discover it to be harmful, but consumers are unlikely to spend large amounts of money on third-party testing for the sake of a small reward. Consumers are clearly the weaker party in this transaction; they simply buy what the supermarket sells. The only hope is for the authorities to provide protection. Fourth, there are major failings in agricultural production methods. Pesticides, fertilisers, herbicides, additives and agricultural membranes are the conventional weapons of modern agriculture. Now the authorities have popularised a new addition to the arsenal: genetically modified food. Out-of-season crops increase the levels of chemicals in foods. Intensive animal farming brings poultry to market in 28 to 45 days, pigs in 10 to 16 weeks. This battle against biology means our food is full of chemicals, hormones and additives. Fifth, oversight is weak and unable to deal with food pollution at its source. Small-scale farming and numerous retail channels mean supervising food quality is problematic. Currently, testing is carried out at supermarkets and markets. But by that point the chemicals and additives are already in the food, and only a minority of products are taken off the shelves the majority slip through the net. To keep the locals happy, local government play down major events and do not even report the small ones. Supervision by ordinary people is necessary to keep chemicals out of our food. Sixth, scientists are not doing a good enough job. The confusing profusion of chemicals and additives is a new development. Scientists deliberately exaggerate the positive effects of their inventions and play down the negative impacts. Melamine was the masterpiece of a scientist without enough of a conscience. Yet the work of many chemists, biologists and agricultural scientists is focused on food production. It would not be difficult to do away with the chemicals and adopt organic farming; the difficulty is getting a good price for good produce when our very food is traded by merchants who compete on cost. Relying on fines is inadequate: we need systems that supervise producers; that let consumers know where their food is sourced; and that allow third-party certification, with strict annual checks. Consumers should bear the costs of food produced in a healthy environment, in a voluntarily, market environment. If the number of genuinely organic products on the market were to increase, so would the demand for organic products. We need food safety, and safe food must be produced in a healthy environment. We must gradually do away with chemicals, fertilisers, herbicides, agricultural membrane and genetically modified food. The costs and labour involved can be recovered through the sale of premium-priced organic foods, thus restoring the ever-deteriorating rural environment.
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