China Environmental Law

As the environment in China’s eastern cities stabilizes or sees marginal improvement, the focus of China’s anti-pollution efforts is shifting to the countryside. 

The problems of domestic, industrial, and agricultural wastes in rural areas are enormous:

• Domestic wastes are largely untreated and responsible for a lack clean drinking water for hundreds of millions of rural residents. According to China Daily, Vice-Minister of Environment Protection Wu Xiaoqing, 280 million tons of household garbage, 9 billion tons of domestic sewage and 260 million tons of human excrement were generated - and mostly dispersed on site or at will - per year.
• Rural factories and mines typically have not been well-regulated from an environmental standpoint, and continue to dispose of large amounts of often toxic wastes into the air, water, and soil. The threat of pollution from factories is increasing as some factories move inland in an attempt to avoid stricter regulation along the coast.
• China is the world’s biggest, and one of its most inefficient, fertilizer and pesticide users. Every year, as reported by Gov.cn, China uses more than 360 kg of fertilizer per hectare of land, 3.3 times more than the United States and 1.6 times more than the average for EU countries. But only 30 percent of it is used effectively, compared to 60 percent in developed countries. This means, as China Dailypoints out, that much is swept away by runoff, causing eutrophication of surface water (such as the algae choking Dianchi Lake, Taihu Lake and Chaohu Lake) or polluting underground water systems
• Pollution from livestock breeding is also a huge problem. According to China Daily, while 2.7 billion tons of livestock excrement was generated annually, only 20 percent of rural breeding farms had adequate (if any) pollution treatment facilities. For more information on the environmental cost of meat production, see here.

To start to tackle these problems, China announced last December that it was initiating a survey of pollution sources in rural areas. As noted by Gov.cn,

Focusing on animal, crop and fish farming, the survey will provide a pollution blueprint that can be used as a point of reference for future decision making, Zhang Fengtong, head of the department of science, technology and education under the Ministry of Agriculture, said.

In addition,

more than 1,000 “clean” villages are currently being developed, which have the capability to properly dispose of 90 percent of all household waste and sewage, and where the use of fertilizers and pesticides has been reduced by 15 percent to 30 percent.

The ministry is also helping to promote energy conservation and pollution control by building biogas digesters in rural areas and making more efficient use of pesticides and fertilizers, Zhang said.

Other goals to be achieved by 2010 include:

• ensure the quality of all drinking water sources (this is a tall order, and I can’t imagine it can be achieved by 2010),
• boosting the volume of waste materials - crop straw, domestic waste, livestock excrement and sewage - treated by at least 10 percent, and
• provide 65 percent of people in rural areas with access to sanitary toilets.

Some are pessimistic these goals will be achieved given the current resource allocation and splintered management of rural affairs.  China Daily notes that

With barely 16 months away, the government should also introduce tax and credit incentives to encourage more private enterprises to get involved in the rural environmental protection market, Wang Shaojie, vice-chairman of the China Democratic National Construction Association, earlier said.

However, one expert said that the major obstacle to rural water management is that despite the fact that several ministries and the SEPA [now MEP] say they allocate funds to individual projects, no single body is directly responsible for the matter as a whole.

Two weeks ago the State Council held its first-ever meeting on environmental protection in the countryside.  This certainly demonstrates a ratcheting up of concern for these issues, but the challenges are huge. 

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at what happens when a group of rural residents decide they have had enough and seek to have their concerns about the environment addressed by “fighting City Hall.”