Chinese walker

Popular belief has it that obesity only affects wealthier societies where food is plentiful: the curse of the developed world epitomized by hulking Americans that struggle to order their king-size Big Mac, French Fries and Coke without breaking sweat.

Obesity is no longer exclusive to the developed world

The reality is a very different. Obesity and its associated diseases – diabetes, hypertension and kidney diseases – respect neither wealth nor class and strike instead into the heart of every society where there is easy access to convenience food, low physical activity and ubiquitous advertisements for sugar-fat-salt-rich food.

Heart disease, stroke, cancer and other chronic diseases associated with poor diet and low exercise have now made serious inroads into the lives of people in poor and middle-income nations. In total, these accounted for 80% (28 million) of the cases of chronic illness in 2005, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), which fears that a further 388 million people will die from such illnesses over the next ten years.

Photo by Malias

Across South East Asia, cases of chronic disease are also high, accounting for 54% of all deaths during 2005. The situation in Thailand is particularly serious, says the WHO, which estimates that the number of obese 5-to-12 year olds increased from 12.2% to 15.6% in just two years. Obesity is generally associated with older age groups, but has yet to permeate into poorer areas where the price of convenience food associated with the epidemic is prohibitive.

China, too, has an emerging epidemic with one or two pockets of high incidence. Overall, obesity levels range from under 5% to almost 20% in some areas, according to regional surveys conducted during 2003. Most concerning, however, is high prevalence among the young. In Wuhan Province 8.9% of 10-12 year-olds were classified as obese by the study. Some areas, such as Beijing, also suggest that there is a gender perspective to the epidemic. In the capital more than 10% of 10-12 year old boys were obese – more than three times the rate for girls in the same study.

Responsibilities are divided

The existence of a genetic predisposition to obesity would provide a straight-forward explanation for the world`s growing stock of rotund individuals, but the precise causes of obesity are multiple.

Changing diets have clearly contributed to the development of the pandemic, driven by the move towards food processing that relies heavily on high injections of sugar and salt. Recent research by The Thai Health Promotion Foundation, for example, found that more than 90% of its sample of 700 pre-packed foods to contain excessive levels of sugar, fat and salt – a cocktail that can lead to diabetes and hypertension as well as obesity.

Choice, of course, enables informed individuals to avoid (or moderate their consumption of) foods that are known to have damaging health effects, but bad labeling, the study suggests, does not help in the decision-making process. Just one third of the sample in Thailand, for example, managed to provide adequate nutritional information on their packaging or list ingredients. Where available, say researchers, labels also tended to use small fonts and present information in a way that is difficult to understand. At least part of the blame, therefore, lies with the food industry itself.

Photo by Malingering

Children are most at risk

For now, young Thais have refrained from overindulgence in burgers and chips on account of taste. But tastes are changing and so is the food industry. Pizza Hut (aka Pizza Company in Thailand) has already rewritten its menu to include a Tum Yum Kung (spicy prawn soup) variety. Western convenience food, which contains 3 or 4 times more fat, sugar and salt than healthier local Thai snacks, is now thought to pose one of the greatest dangers to a country of “snackers.”

Catering to oriental taste in order to boost market share is only one dimension of the corporate weaponry. Intensive marketing activity now mostly targets children and changing cultural values now mean that a visit to see Ronald McDonald has become a symbol of growing affluence and status. The price of a Big Mac in Bangkok (the equivalent of USD 1.5 or Baht 60) may cover the food costs of one meal for a family of four, but younger Thais are prepared to splash out on junk-food if it means impressing friends – especially girlfriends. Similar trends are noted throughout many of China`s larger central and eastern metropolises. Shopping malls in Cambodia also house fashionable western eateries that only the privileged can afford.

Obesity ought not to be a problem affecting children, but cases as young as 3 are not exceptional. And for those that then become obese adults the risks (particularly in developing countries) have alarming potential – an increasing susceptibility to illness coupled with reliance on fragile health care systems that may not be able to offer or afford treatment. In China, there is only a very basic social safety net and hospitals are run like profit-making concerns: Only those that can afford treatment receive treatment

Child obesity is expected to soar worldwide according to the International journal of Pediatric obesity, and could start to erode health gains in many countries. Both morbidity and cases of premature death are expected to rise over the next decade costing the economies of China, India and Russian billion of dollars according to the WHO. China alone will lose $558 billion over the next 10 years of its national income due to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. And other important Asian economies – Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and others – are fast reaching western levels of development and consumption.

Photo by Robad0b

An incomplete response

The place of food in the moral, political and monetary economy has changed radically in the last fifty years – and the result has been a vast and potentially catastrophic loss of equilibrium. The global food producer, who can move from country to country, acquiring land, importing agricultural machinery and fertiliser, and selling his product in the global market, poses a threat to the environment of a kind that has never been seen before.

And the global food distributor, who can descend like Wal-Mart on the periphery of any town anywhere in the world, with a tempting array of cheap food wrapped in plastic, poses a threat to local economies and lifestyles comparable to that posed by a tribe of belligerent invaders.

Those vast disequilibriating forces did not come about because someone planned them. They arose by %26lsquo;an invisible hand`, from the developments in international trade, agricultural technology and food processing that have occurred since the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, there has been little or no effort from our political elites to come to terms with, still less to moderate, their adverse effects, and the perceived indifference of our governments to forces which are not merely changing every aspect of our lives but also impacting on the lives and environments of people all over the globe, is one reason for the growing movements of protest against the global food economy.

Much that people lament in the decline of traditional farming results, however, not from the global food economy as such, but from the local imposition of regulations that only global producers and distributors can comply with. The strange illusion that food is unsafe until wrapped in plastic has promoted an explosion of absurd regulations designed to quell the anxieties of our increasingly risk-averse populations.

But, by avoiding the small-scale risks associated with local food, people expose themselves to the large-scale risks associated with obesity, environmental degradation and the weakening of the human immune system. It is not enough to protect people from this or that infectious disease that is transmitted through the food chain. For diseases transmitted through the food-chain are for the most part diseases against which people acquire immunity, as all who have suffered from traveller`s tummy will know. Present policies towards diseases of the digestive tract may actually be making children more vulnerable to those diseases in the long-run and also requiring ever greater efforts to ensure that we are presented from birth to death with the kind of sterilised food that our weakened immune systems can deal with. This is fine in the short term; but one major hiccup, in the form of war, epidemic or economic disruption, and the result could be a large-scale disaster.

Global meat consumption is predicted to double by 2020. Much of this increase will come from China, where the growing middle class is demanding more meat and other animal products. As a result, China is now rushing helter-skelter down the path blazed by giant agribusiness corporations in western nations. Once, the animals we raised went out and gathered things we could not or would not eat. Cows ate grass, chickens pecked at worms or seeds. Then we ate their flesh, or their eggs, or drank their milk, thus adding to the amount of food available to us.

In this superficial age of ours, a swathe of beauty parlours has opened to meet the cosmetic needs of the adult population. But few people know that while the artificially produced beautiful people walk down our streets, the food products in our markets are also undergoing cosmetic treatments.

Wenling City in Zhejiang Province is famous all over the country for its prawns. The prawns from that area are yellowy pink, and look delicious, but behind this delicious exterior lies a dark secret. A local manager involved in the prawn processing business told me that the processing treatment is quite simple.

First the prawns are cooked in boiling water, then they are dried and peeled. The most important step of this process is the cooking. The colour of the prawns depends on the length of cooking time, so it is important to get it right.

The secret, though, is to add some red powder to the cooking pot, and to keep adding it during the cooking process. The colour stays on the prawn after the drying process for two or three months. The prawn producers in the area all use this red powder. According to various investigations, this red powder is called %26lsquo;Liangcanghua Essence`, commonly known as %26lsquo;acid red 73`. It is mostly used as a wood dye, and is forbidden as a food additive because it can cause cancer.

Pinglu County in Shandong Province is famous for its fruit. A few illegal canning businesses buy cheap, unripe strawberries, peaches and apricots and put them into cans. Central Television Station`s %26lsquo;Weekly Quality Report` showed how in Xinchao Canning Factory, the workers would pour onto strawberries chemicals to stop rotting and the growth of bacteria, then they would bottle the strawberries, and so as to make them look fresh, the workers would pour a red liquid into the bottles, a carmine colour, so that the green, unripe strawberries are transformed into red strawberries. And the method of turning white peaches into yellow canned peaches is even more horrifying. First the white peaches are put in a steel vat, and the skin is removed using industrial caustic soda, then they are soaked in lemon yellow and sunset yellow dyes and boiled, so that the white peaches turn a yellow colour. After that, sweeteners are added, the cans are labelled and sent off all over the country.

The beautiful cakes that are made for Chinese New Year always look appealing. But the beautiful exterior often hides dangerous, illegal contents. A New Year Cake shop in Shanghai`s Pudong District fumigates its cakes with a sulphur powder to preserve their shop life, whitens them with industrial bleach, and even uses cheap industrial sodium hydrosulphite to make the cakes look fresh. According to a worker in this shop, they were not the only company to use sulphur powder and sodium hydrosulphite, many other factories have used them for some time.

Recently the Nanjing hygiene quality inspectors have banned all products from the %26lsquo;Haibawangjia Tianxia` Company, because it has been found that they have altered the dates of quick-freeze products that have passed their sell-by dates, and put them on the market again. It was found that this company would scrape off the old sell-by dates and replace them with new ones before trying to sell the products off again. For suspicious customers, there is now no difference between products that have no sell-by dates printed on them from those that do, as they can`t be sure that the sell-by dates have been tampered with. How can people eat these kinds of products with any peace of mind? And many supermarkets sell loose dumplings, mixing up the fresh ones with the out of date ones. The factories just put the old dumplings into new bags and send them off to the supermarkets to be sold, and no one is the wiser.

On 1 June, this kind of thing happened in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. Seeing that the date on the 30,000 bottles of soft drinks had nearly arrived, the unscrupulous manager of the %26lsquo;Ketaolu` drink company decided to wipe the dates off using some kind of glue, then printed a new sell-by date that was a full thirteen months later than the old one.

Many customers wonder how it is that products that have passed their sell-by dates are not destroyed, but are instead returned to the manufacturer who then changes the dates and sells them again. Who is responsible for destroying products that have passed their sell-by dates? What have the relevant government bodies done about this situation?

There are many strange things that happen in food production. The Many Fresh Oranges drink processing company produces drinks that have no trace of real orange in them. What you find in the company`s factory is not oranges but nearly ten different kinds of sweeteners, flavourings additives and colourings. This was seen in April 2004 in their factory in Nanchang. The drink is just made from tap water and a great deal of additives that far exceed the maximum levels set by the government.

Even more worrying is the so-called %26lsquo;organic green tea` that purports to be of no danger to public health, but that in fact contain high levels of pesticides. The Xuanlang Tea Company of Shizi, Anhui Province, cultivates 20,000 mu (540 square kilometres) of tea. It is supposed to be a model for organic farming in China. A reporter from CCTV visited several tea farms in the locality and found that many farmers who had contracted land in the area were in fact using phosphate fertilisers, Jiaji 1605 and other such toxic agricultural chemicals. In the tea factory, the reporter found that the workers were adding glutinous rice powder to the tea, so as to make the thick, fresh tea leaves curl up. In the Number 3 Jingzhi Tea Company of Xuanlang it was discovered that the rice mixture sprayed on the tea was black. This meant that even the %26lsquo;dregs` of the tea could be sold for the same price as the proper tea.

There have been many suspicions about the dried milk pieces produced in China, with rumours that they contain no fresh milk. These rumours have damaged the domestic dairy industry. There has been a recent loss of trust in the safety of milk pieces. Many supermarkets have taken the product off their shelves or have demanded to see authenticity documents from the manufacturers. All milk pieces have been removed from the shops in Chongqing, and in Guangzhou, the customers have demanded refunds for the milk pieces that they have bought.

Recently, Beijing`s Quality Inspection Department made an investigation into meat products and canned foods, and found that only 75% of the meat products met with the safety regulations. The main problem with the meat products was that they used high levels of benzoic acid. Half of the canned food didn`t meet with the regulations. Only 66.7% of tinned tomatoes met with the regulations. The largest problem here was the quality of the ingredients and the high levels of additives. On 6 August, the department announced the results of an investigation it made into drinks that use carbonic acid. It looked into 30 drinks produces by 29 Beijing companies, and found only 18 met with the regulations – that is a failure rate of 69%. During the investigation it was discovered that the levels of saccharomycete and sulphur dioxide were too high.

Jiangsu Province has recently investigated 543 cake manufacturers, and found that of 113 cakes tested, only 65 met with the regulations, which is a pass rate of just 57.5%. After that the Jiangsu Hygiene Department warned customers to take care when buying unpackaged food products.

In Hunan, there is a tradition of pickling vegetables in earthenware pots. There is a fish head dish cooked with these pickles that is particularly famous in this region. But a quality inspection team in Hunan`s Qiuyang City found in the Xiangbei Market, a factory whose 60 square metres of floor space was covered with more than 80 black plastic bags, and that in the salty water in which the vegetables were being pickled were floating dead black and white cockroach-like insects.

An inspection team of Beijing`s Haidian District investigated a private supplier of dried radishes, and found that 25 tonnes, or more than 1300 boxes, of %26lsquo;Qianjiang` dried radishes that were headed for Beijing`s expensive hotels had levels of formic acid that were 5 to 7 times higher than those allowed.

On 11 April, the National Quality Inspection Department announced that they had found four products that contained illegal quantities of brightening agents. These were: %26lsquo;Qinlaoda` flour produced by Xian`s Qinlaoda Food Company; %26lsquo;Meidian` noodles produced by Shanghai`s Meidian Company; %26lsquo;Fengtao` flour and %26lsquo;Fengtao` noodles produced by Nanjing`s Chuangxin Food Company. They also announced that a survey into white and brown sugar in 2004 found serious problems with the white sugar produced by Haikou`s Jingshan Sugar Company, Yunnan`s Fulong Sugar Company, Yunnan`s Xingfu Sugar Company, and Yunnan`s Bafang Sugar Company. The main causes for concern were the high levels of sulphur dioxide residues, insufficient levels of sucrose, high quantities of dirt and grit, and unsatisfactory labelling.

Perhaps the biggest difference between food in the West and in China is that Chinese people like to eat lots of little snacks whereas Westerners prefer one %26lsquo;main meal`. In the West, restaurants and fast food outlets produce standardised meals, where quantities are strictly regulated. But the Chinese have a long history of eating snacks. Traditionally an agricultural country, when farmers went out onto the fields, they would bring snacks with them to eat and to share with friends, or would swap them with farmers from neighbouring villages. The quality of the snack was important – it would indicate how skilful the wife was in the kitchen and help the family to maintain their %26lsquo;face`. So over the centuries the quality of these snacks became better and better, so that gradually, all over China, one could find snacks that were both delicious and safe.

I think that when people eat snacks, their trust in what they are eating and the need to %26lsquo;keep face` is more important than the actual eating of the snack itself. But now these snacks that have such a long and glorious history strike terror in people`s hearts. Let`s just look at pickled vegetables. Although pickled vegetables were first made in Sichuan, there is hardly anyone in the whole country who hasn`t tasted this delicious snack. But now when you visit Sichuan, your friends will say to you: %26lsquo;Do you like pickled vegetables? There`s a factory in Chengdu that pickles the vegetables in DDVP.` In the past everyone in Sichuan would have pickled vegetables with their meals, but now the managers of some pickled vegetable factories say that, %26lsquo;We don`t eat any of these pickles in Sichuan, we sell them to people from other provinces.`

After some secret interviews, I finally uncovered the truth about this business. The most important part of the pickling process is the soaking. I noticed that the salt used in the pickling was not only whiter than most salt, but the grains were finer. So I asked, %26lsquo;How come it`s so white?` The manager said, %26lsquo;This salt is bought on the black market. It`s cheaper by 50 yuan a jin.` Later in the yard outside, I saw printed on the bags of salt the terrifying words, %26lsquo;Industrial Salt`, and %26lsquo;Not for human consumption.`

The workers of this factory showed me in another yard neatly arranged piles of this industrial salt. I asked, %26lsquo;Have you always used this salt?` They said, %26lsquo;Yes.` I said, %26lsquo;Do the other factories use it?` And the workers all nodded in reply. A few days later I returned to the factory, and noticed lots of little insects crawling around the vats of pickled vegetables, and I asked why there were so many insects. The manager said, %26lsquo;When we soak the vegetables there are always a lot of insects, but when we add the chemicals they all disappear.` A little later, a worker started adding chemicals to the vats. I asked what the chemicals were and the worker replied that they were insect killers. He also said that to ensure that no insects got to them, the pickles would be sprayed with insecticide every two or three days until they left the factory. When I asked exactly what kind of insecticide it was, both the manager and the workers said that they didn`t know. Because there was no label on the bottle of the chemical they used, I took a small sample of the red liquid, put it in a sealed container and sent it off to be checked by the China Food Import Export Investigation Centre, and was told that this chemical was 99% strength DDVP . . .

Only about a third of the pickles produced in Chengdu meet with the regulations imposed by the Chengdu Quality Inspection Department. On 16 June 2004, the Chengdu Quality Inspection Department announced the results of its survey into pickled vegetables. Of 70 batches of products produced by 56 factories, only 16 batches made the grade, which is a pass rate of just 22.86%. 17 batches had levels of additives above the maximum allowed. It was also discovered that 9 batches did not have as much product as labelled and 48 batches had labels that were inaccurate or had insufficient information. The Quality Inspection Department has requested that all those companies that didn`t make the grade rectify their mistakes.

In Guizhou there is a saying that %26lsquo;If you don`t eat something sour for three days, your legs will go soft`. The Guizhou restaurants have become famous for their sour fish soups, but recently 215 of them have developed some serious problems. On 16 June 2004, it was found that in 215 restaurants, there were high levels of opiates in their soup and flavourings, and the authorities have ordered these restaurants to be closed down. Zhang Xin, deputy head of Guizhou`s Anti-drug team, told me that the Anti-drug team joined forces with the disease prevention centre and the food quality inspection department to launch a campaign against the addition of opiates to food products. A combined investigation team carried out research in to 2642 restaurants in Guiyang, Bijie and Liupanshui, and found that in 215 restaurants, the food sold contained traces of opiates in varying quantities. During the campaign, 3,200 grams of opiate seeds and 1,700 grams of opiate shells were confiscated. The relevant authorities have closed these 215 restaurants, and ordered 36 other restaurants whose problems were a less serious to undergo retraining. It is said that many Guizhou restaurants that specialise in beef, lamb, dog, and spicy soups add opiates to their food so as to encourage their customers to return. Wei Tao, the deputy head of the Guizhou Disease Prevention Office, told me that some of the soups served at the restaurants contain traces of morphine, some in rather high quantities. He said that if the customers drink this soup over a long period of time they can become addicted to it, and their dependency might even drive them to take harder drugs.

China`s many varieties of grassland cover an area of 1 billion acres. They account for 41% of the country`s total area, and are 3.3 times the size of its cropland. Yet these vast grasslands cannot feed the animals they are home to, which together account for one-third of China`s livestock. Many years of overgrazing have led to the deterioration of 90% of China`s grasslands, giving rise to environmental problems such as sandstorms.

Ecologists sometimes refer to the “10% rule”: that 10% of the energy of a primary producer should be passed on to a secondary producer. This means that under good environmental conditions, the world`s green vegetation totals about 200 billion tonnes (pure carbon), of which around 10% will be eaten by herbivorous animals. The dry weight of vegetation on China`s grasslands is 300 million tonnes, leaving about 30 million tonnes for grazing if the ecosystem were undamaged. But the methods currently used to calculate grassland capacity are flawed, and overgrazing is widespread. Actual numbers of livestock are far above even %26lsquo;theoretical` thresholds, and the grasslands have inevitably deteriorated. How can this pressure be relieved and the grasslands allowed to recover?

The answer lies not with the grasslands, but in China’s cropfields. Aside from producing 500 million tonnes of food, China`s 167 million acres of farmland also produce over 700 million tonnes of straw. Corn, wheat and rice make up 38%, 22% and 19% of the total straw, respectively. Other crops produce smaller proportions, such as legumes (4.8%), tubers (2.8%) and rapeseed (8.3%). Of this straw, 94.9% can be used as fodder. In fact, all of China`s straw could provide 22 times as much fodder as the grasslands can reasonably provide. And using technology to double the value of the fodder could feed all of China’s livestock.

Unlike on the grasslands, if straw is eaten by sheep and cattle it can be returned to the land in the form of manure or residue from biogas production. Not only will the land be unharmed, but it will also be fertilised. Livestock production should be moved south, from the arid grasslands of traditional herding areas in Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the food-producing provinces of Shandong, Henan, Hebei, Sichuan and Hunan.

China has 4.7 billion chickens, and an annual demand of 3.7 chickens per person per year. But farmers squeeze chickens into wire cages and overuse additives to fatten them up as quickly as possible. This makes them ready for slaughter in 45 days, as opposed to the 300 days of a free-range chicken. These unnatural meat-production methods are contributing to obesity in our cities. They are aiding the spread of avian flu that endangers food safety and public health, and are inviting criticism of China`s record on animal-welfare issues. The wide open spaces poultry need are not to be found in farmyards, much less in wire cages; the space is out on the grasslands. Chickens present no danger to the grassland, and can help control pests. In the future, the huge quantities of chicken and eggs that China needs should come from the grasslands.

The 1950s saw the birth of the first “Green Revolution”, with world agriculture`s move from tall- to short-stalk crop varieties and the use of pesticides, fertilisers and agricultural machinery. These changes allowed 19 developing countries to achieve food self-sufficiency. But since then, the global population has grown and pollution has worsened. The coming decades will see the world`s population increase from six to nine billion, and the achievements of the Green Revolution will be hard pressed to meet new food and environmental demands. As a result, the United Nation`s Food and Agricultural Organization has called for a new, second Green Revolution.

But what will the weapons of this new revolution be? How can it meet the challenges of increasing food production against a background of shrinking arable land and freshwater resources; the need to protect the environment and public health from the effects of fertilisers and pesticides; and the effects of climate change on agriculture? Scientists have turned to genetic engineering, aiming to transfer advantageous genes to crops and increase harvests. And the media has called it the greatest hope of the new Green Revolution.

Scientists are now able to transplant genes from other species into crops, creating entirely new species and even halving plant growth cycles. US firms Dupont and Monsanto, along with Europe`s Novartis and others, have made massive investments in gene technology research. Pioneer, a US company, has decoded three-quarters of the 80,000 genes in maize, and expects to complete the remaining quarter within five years. Monsanto is attempting to identify and patent 15% of the maize genome.

Support for genetic engineering in China is steadily increasing, and the use of genetically-modified crops to increase harvests has been welcomed by the country`s agricultural industry. China has given priority to the development of pest-resistant cotton, yellow dwarf disease resistant winter wheat, bacterial blight-resistant rice and pesticide-resistant rice; as well as developing brown-rot resistant potatoes and new strains of maize. The country is also committed to developing technology such as genetically-modified “super” pigs, cows and sheep, animal embryo transfers, animal gender-selection technology, genetically-engineered immunisations and bioreactors.

The long list of new technologies shows that for Chinese scientists, the new Green Revolution is about increasing productivity based on the contributions of molecular biology. But they ignore an equally – if not more important – contribution: that from ecology.

China produces 480 million tonnes of grain every year. Of this, 180 million tonnes are used for human consumption, and 120 million tonnes (25% of the total) becomes livestock fodder. Of this fodder, 100 million tonnes is used to feed pigs, China`s second largest consumer of grain after people. Grain production is not the issue therefore; the question is about our sources of meat and milk. A Green Revolution based on ecology should not focus on the production of grain, but of straw. It should use ecological principles to solve food and environmental problems, not polluting methods such as fertilisers and pesticides. The Green Revolution must use existing species to increase humanity`s food supply, rather than manipulating genes.

The ecological solution is not to raise grain production directly, but to utilise the 50% of China’s crop weight that is currently discarded, which is mostly straw, and use it to produce more food, animal fodder and fertiliser. This will greatly increase the productivity of China`s land. The large quantities of organic fertiliser that can be produced as a by-product will increase the harvests from large quantities of low-quality and medium-quality land, indirectly increasing grain production.

China has 1.831 billion mu (around 1,221,000 square kilometres) of cultivatable land, of which 155 million mu (around 133, 000 square kilometres) are salt-affected and 1 billion mu (around 667, 000 square kilometres) is arid. Genetic engineering will not be enough to grow grain in these regions. At the same time, China produces 600 to 700 million tonnes of straw every year, which represents a fresh weight of 1.8 to 2.1 billion tonnes. This could feed 180 to 210 million tonnes of livestock, which would provide, at a conservative estimate, 72 to 84 million tonnes of meat. Assuming five portions of grain are equivalent to one portion of meat, China`s annual straw production generates the equivalent of a further 360 to 420 million tonnes of grain, a figure twice current production levels. Animals and microorganisms can convert the currently-unused straw to food and grain, something that no technology can currently do. Of course, we cannot use all of this straw, but with technological advances, using half of it would be entirely plausible. Currently, 73% of China`s straw is burnt, discarded or used in other low-efficiency ways, so there is certainly a lot of scope for its increased use.

We must also turn to China`s mobile fertiliser factories: the country`s cows and sheep. The average cow produces 25 kilograms of dung per day, and 50% of China`s straw production could feed from 360 to 420 million head of cattle: a total of 3.28 to 3.83 billion tonnes of dung per year. This entirely organic fertiliser would contain between 5.67 and 6.62 million tonnes of nitrogen, equivalent to between 28.35 and 33.10 million tonnes of ammonium sulphate. This approaches China`s total annual fertiliser production of 33.90 million tonnes, but unlike chemical fertilisers, the use of this organic fertiliser will not harm the soil or cause pollution. Tests I carried out at Shandong Agricultural University show that if the amount of organic matter in the soil is raised from 1% to 5%, the amount of fertiliser used can be cut in half and still increase productivity.

Processed straw will feed cattle and the dung will produce biogas. The sludge from biogas production can then be returned to the fields as organic fertiliser. China already has this technology, but its use is seasonal and decentralised. Straw production is difficult to centralise, and should be collected and used locally on a local level. There is already the technology to convert straw into fodder for cows and sheep.

Malnutrition is a major issue in developing countries, and meat is much more nutritious than grain. Using straw to produce meat, milk and fertilisers provides countries with necessary nutrition and organic fertiliser for their soil. All nations, particularly developing ones, should launch a new Green Revolution in which ecology plays a leading role, both solve food security issues and improve the environment.

Jiang Gaoming is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences` Institute of Botany. He is also vice secretary-general of the UNESCO China-MAB (Man and the Biosphere) Committee and a member of the UNESCO MAB Urban Group.

Food safety is a basic need for any population, yet we hear warnings of hidden dangers on the dining-room table – of unsafe rice and poisoned vegetables. With the launch of the China Soil Survey, pollution of our soil is now receiving the kind of attention once accorded to air and water, solid waste and noise.

Soil pollution has been called the “invisible pollution.” While other forms of pollution have obvious warning signs – visible contamination of a river, for example, or an airborne stench – soil pollution is easier to miss. And so this grave threat has been growing unnoticed in our fields.

In some areas of China, soil already suffers from varying degrees of pollution. According to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), the situation is worsening and already represents a threat to the environment, to food safety and to sustainable agriculture. According to a scientific sampling, 150 million mu (100,000 square kilometres) of China`s cultivated land have been polluted, with contaminated water being used to irrigate a further 32.5 million mu (21,670 square kilometres) and another 2 million mu (1,300 square kilometres) covered or destroyed by solid waste. In total, the area accounts for one-tenth of China`s cultivatable land, and is mostly in economically developed areas.

Soil pollution presents a genuine danger. An estimated 12 million tonnes of grain are contaminated by heavy metals every year, causing direct losses of 20 billion yuan (US$2.57 billion). Harmful substances accumulate in crops and, via the food chain, find their way into our bodies, where they can cause a variety of illnesses. Soil pollution also damages ecosystems and ultimately threatens their safety.

Measures to prevent soil pollution are weak in China. Currently, given the amount of land in question, the degree of the pollution in specific locations is unclear, making both prevention and remedy difficult. There are no laws or environmental standards regarding soil. Funding is limited, too, so there is little advanced scientific study of China`s soil taking place. The severity of the pollution is not understood by either the public or business, and the situation is worsening.

More worryingly, treating soil pollution – especially that caused by heavy metals – is costly, and such contamination is difficult to eliminate completely. According to Liu Xiaoduan, a specialist at China`s National Research Centre for Geoanalysis (NRCGA), heavy metals are naturally widespread in the soil and cannot be removed. But they can form organic compounds or build in some organisms, and thus end up in the human body, where they accumulate.

“Some time ago, the focus of our work shifted from prospecting for ore, and we now have a number of different aims,” says an official with the China Geological Survey`s department of geological investigation. The aim of agricultural security grew from ensuring quantity to ensuring safety; soil management has become about quality rather than quantity, and environmental awareness is ever increasing. Geochemistry is playing a greater role in both the economy and society.

The science and technology behind prospecting for ore is now the basis for environmental geochemistry, which includes the earth`s atmosphere and hydrosphere, ecosystems and geology – allowing China to carry out detailed and precise soil surveys. It allows geochemistry to play a role in studies of the environment, agriculture, soil quality, oceans and prospecting, and also helps scientists to develop geochemical theory and new technology.

Lu Anhuai, of Peking University`s school of earth and space sciences, says that surveys have found regional geochemical abnormalities which impact upon the environment of cities and villages, and even upon China as a whole. The survey group proposed a number of economic measures to help protect the environment, which were given serious consideration by the government. Surveys of 21 provinces found localised geochemical issues, such as areas of high disease incidence, and various environmental problems in areas which produce particular crops or which surround mines.

China previously carried out two national soil surveys, in the late 1950s and in the `70s. Both studies focused on soil fertility and agricultural productivity, rather than soil pollution. However, the aim of the latest government-funded appraisal — costing 1 billion yuan (US$128.6 million) — is to study the overall state of China`s soil in a comprehensive, systematic and accurate manner. It is intended to: identify the type, degree and cause of soil-pollution hotspots; evaluate associated risks; set environmental classifications for soil; select and trial soil-recovery technology; put together a system of laws and standards regarding soil pollution; and improve environmental management of soil.

Due to conclude in 2008, the survey will focus on protected farmland and grain production areas. The soil-pollution survey will focus on the Yangtze and Pearl River basins, the area surrounding the Bohai Gulf, the former heavy-industrial areas of the north-east, the plains of Sichuan and Shanxi, and major mining cities. The formation of a system to oversee soil environmental quality will focus on improving testing ability and drafting soil pollution laws.

The Geological Survey bureau says three million square kilometres of soil in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins, the plains of the northeast, developed coastal areas and the west of China. One million square kilometres have been surveyed already; and a further one million will be examined in the time of the 11th Five Year Plan, which runs to 2010. Completion is due in the period of the 12th Five Year Plan. Regional situations will be summarised and a “National Geochemical Map” produced, which will finally allow us to fully grasp the truth of soil pollution in China.

This article was adapted from China Environmental Times, December 28, 2006.

Qi Xu is a journalist for China Environmental Times.

Homepage photo by Ari Moore

There is an old proverb, beloved of fisherfolk in Pakistan, that says when all else fails, the sea will provide. Now, after centuries of surviving on fish such as the tuna and shrimp that thrive in Pakistan`s coastal waters, many traditional fishing communities are facing ruin as the sea is stripped bare by foreign trawler fleets and industrial overfishing.

According to trade campaigners, it is a story that is being replicated in poor fishing communities in developing countries across the world. And as the current round of World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations splutter back to life, the demise of Pakistan`s fishing communities is being held up as a warning of the impact that the moves to further liberalise global fishing could have on some of the world’s most deprived communities.

The Pakistani Maritime Security Agency (MSA), which polices fishing along Pakistan’s coastline, says there are currently 23 mid-size trawling boats and 21 trans-national trawlers operating with licences in Pakistani waters.

Local fishermen in Ibrahim Hydri, a small fishing town in the sparse Sindh coastal province, unload their fishing boats just metres from half-a-dozen trawlers with Chinese insignia in the town harbour. Many dispute the official figures, insisting that around 100 foreign ships have been spotted in local waters in the last 12 months.

“Since the government has let these foreign ships into our waters, our stocks have depleted and there is nothing left,” says local fisherman Abbas Ali. “For hundreds of years, our forefathers have fished these waters, but our children are going to end up beggars.”

He says the town’s small wooden fishing boats are no match for the trawlers. “It’s like trying to race a truck with a bicycle,” he says. “In just a few years, these people have come here, destroyed the sea, and stolen our livelihoods from us.”

In recent years, Pakistan has steadily been stepping up its efforts to exploit what it terms the “untapped potential” of its fish stock. In 1982, the government opened its waters to international fishing fleets, and in 2003-04 alone more than 90,255 tonnes of fish and fishery products were exported from Pakistan, to countries including the United Kingdom, Japan and Sri Lanka.

Pakistan’s 2001 deep-sea policy set out a plan to further increase foreign-exchange earnings from the increased export of fisheries and fishing products. The same policy relaxed regulations that restricted trawler activity to a zone 35 to 200 kilometres from shore after pressure from “friendly” trading partners, such as China and Taiwan. Licensed medium-sized trawlers are now allowed to fish 20 kilometres from shore, an area previously reserved exclusively to protect the livelihood of local fisherfolk.

Men scrubbing down their boats at Ibrahim Hydri say the impact that trawling and overfishing has had on their livelihoods and on the marine environment has been devastating. They estimate that the daily catch has declined by 70% to 80% in the last decade. Five years ago, it took Ali 36 hours to catch 1,000 kilogrammes of fish that fed and supported his family. Now he and seven other men return after 15 days at sea with a catch that weighs in at just under 500 kilogrammes.

As he hauls his nets to shore, Ali reels off the names of more than a dozen fish species that are no longer found in the surrounding waters. Reports by the Pakistani Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), a environmental campaigning group set up to protect the rights of local fishing communities, say that more than 50% of local marine species have been almost wiped out by intensive fishing of Pakistan’s sovereign waters.

According to its research, only 10% of the fish caught by the trawlers’ nets can be sold on the international markets; this leads to the other 90% being pumped back into the sea and thereby increasing marine pollution in shallow waters.

“Tonnes of fish that could have been used to sustain the livelihoods of local fisherman have been needlessly destroyed through foreign trawling,” says Mohammad Ali Shah, chairman of PFF. Foreign trawlers, he says, are the “last straw” for fishermen who have seen their livelihoods destroyed in the name of progress.

Pollution from the trawlers joins 1.14 billion litres (300 million gallons) of urban sewage and 270 tonnes of industrial waste that is pumped into the sea from multiple channels every day. Dams and barrages built with World Bank loans along the delta of the Indus, Pakistan’s longest river, have starved marine channels of fresh water, resulting in many inland fishing communities migrating to the coastal waters in search of fish. Pollution and over-population have contributed to the demise of the mangroves that provided breeding grounds for shrimps that previously provided the backbone for much of the local economy.

There is repeated criticism from environmental campaigners that, despite pressure from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Pakistan has yet to undertake an up-to-date fish stock survey. This means that licences to foreign trawling fleets could be issued without the government having a clear idea of how many fish are left in Pakistan’s waters.

In a new report entitled Taking the Fish, ActionAid — one of the international non-governmental organisations working with PFF — says the exploitation of Pakistan’s marine environment is being done with no regard for the environmental or social impact on communities or resources. It is now calling on Pakistan’s government to ban foreign trawlers and institutionalise in its fishing policy the FAO’s code of conduct for responsible fisheries.

Moazzam Khan, deputy director of the Marine Fisheries Department (MFD) in Karachi, admits that Pakistan’s fish stocks are fast depleting, but insists that the government has not issued licences to foreign trawlers since 2005, saying that the declining fish stock and rising fuel prices have made it uneconomical for foreign fleets to operate in Pakistan’s waters. “We always heavily regulated the trawling activity,” he says. “Although we are in talks about issuing further licences, we would not do so without assurances from the trawlers that they would fish in a sustainable manner.”

Khan believes the real problem lies in the growing number of people entering the fishing industry, and says the government is planning to institute no-fishing zones in an attempt to help stocks recover.

But many fishermen dismiss the government’s claims, saying they have never been visited by anyone from the MFD, and that they have seen no evidence of any moves to regulate fishing. “The government has no idea what is happening here,” says Mohammad Ali, a fisherman living in a makeshift tarpaulin hut in the village of Dabla Mohalla Rarri, a fishing community 15 kilometres from Ibrahim Hydri. “There are many trawlers operating illegally in our waters. They stay away when the MSA comes, but when it leaves they come back. They come in so close they are nearly colliding with our fishing boats.”

Trade campaigners argue that even though three-quarters of the world’s fish stocks are deemed to be fully exploited, countries including those in the European Union, plus the United States and Japan, continue to subsidise their fishing industries by an estimated $6.3 billion (%26pound;3.2 billion) a year.

On top of this, the current round of WTO negotiations on subsidies and non-agricultural market access could lead to an elimination or significant reduction of all tariffs in the fish and fish products sector. Already five WTO members, including Brazil and India, have made offers to liberalise parts of their fishing services.

Alex Wijeratna, author of Taking the Fish, and trade policy campaigner at ActionAid UK, says that since Pakistan joined the WTO in 1995, it has independently pursued a significantly more liberalised fish-trade regime.

“If what is happening to poor fishing communities in Pakistan is already happening through bilateral trading agreements outside the WTO, we can only imagine the global impact it would have if liberalisation is locked in by the WTO,” Wijeratna says. “It’s nothing short of mad short-termism.”

In Ibrahim Hydri, there is growing anger about the loss of its traditional livelihood. The community contends that it has been duped by false promises of financial assistance, and that no effort has been made to provide alternative livelihoods. “We are not against development,” says Shah, “but what is happening here is not development. We are going backwards.”

Homepage photo by sahrizvi

The global rush to switch from oil to energy derived from plants will drive deforestation, push small farmers off the land and lead to serious food shortages and increased poverty unless carefully managed, says the most comprehensive survey yet completed of energy crops.

The United Nations report, compiled by all 30 of the world organisation`s agencies, points to crops like palm oil, maize, sugar cane, soya and jatropha. Rich countries want to see these extensively grown for fuel as a way to reduce their own climate-changing emissions. Their production could help stabilise the price of oil, open up new markets and lead to higher commodity prices for the poor.

But the UN urges governments to beware their human and environmental impacts, some of which could have irreversible consequences.

Released on May 8, 2007, the report, which predicts winners and losers, will be studied carefully by the emerging multi-billion-dollar-a-year biofuel industry, which wants to provide as much as 25% of the world`s energy within 20 years.

Global production of energy crops is doubling every few years, and 17 countries have so far committed themselves to growing the crops on a large scale.

Last year more than a third of the entire maize crop in the United States went to ethanol for fuel, a 48% increase on 2005, and Brazil and China grew the crops on nearly 50 million acres of land. The European Union has said that 10% of all fuel must come from biofuels by 2020. Biofuels can be used in place of petrol (gasoline) and diesel fuel and can play a part in reducing emissions from transport.

On the positive side, the UN says that the crops have the potential to reduce and stabilise the price of oil, which could be very beneficial to poor countries. But it acknowledges that forests are already being felled to provide the land to grow vast plantations of palm oil trees. Environment groups argue strongly that this is catastrophic for the climate, and potentially devastating for forest animals like orang-utans in Indonesia.

The UN warns: “Where crops are grown for energy purposes, the use of large-scale cropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion and nutrient leaching. Even varied crops could have negative impacts if they replace wild forests or grasslands.”

But the survey`s findings are mixed on whether the crops will benefit or penalise poor countries, where most of the crops are expected to be grown in future. One school of thought argues that they will take the best land, which will increase global food prices. This could benefit some farmers but penalise others and also increase the cost of emergency food aid.

“Expanded production [of biofuel crops] adds uncertainty. It could also increase the volatility of food prices with negative food security implications”, says the report, which was complied by UN-Energy.

“The benefits to farmers are not assured, and may come with increased costs. [Growing biofuel crops] can be especially harmful to farmers who do not own their own land, and to the rural and urban poor who are net buyers of food, as they could suffer from even greater pressure on already limited financial resources.

“At their worst, biofuel programmes can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world`s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty,” it says.

According to the report, the crops could transform the rural economy of rich and poor countries, attracting major new players and capital, but potentially leading to problems. “Large investments are already signalling the emergence of a new bio-economy, pointing to the possibility that still larger companies will enter the rural economy, putting the squeeze on farmers by controlling the price paid to producers and owning the rest of the value train,” it says.

The report also says the crops are not guaranteed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Producing and using biofuels results in some reductions in emissions compared to petroleum fuels, it says, but this is provided there is no clearing of forest or peat that store centuries of carbon.

“More and more people are realising that there are serious environmental and food security issues involved in biofuels. Climate change is the most serious issue, but you cannot fight climate change by large-scale deforestation,” said Jan van Aken, of Greenpeace International in Amsterdam.

“Bioenergy provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to address climate change, energy security and rural development. [But] investments need to be planned carefully to avoid generating new environmental and social problems,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Plant power