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  • From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] China ag disaster affects U.S. and world
  • Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 10:17:47 -0700

If China can't feed itself, it either resorts to a long-term uncertain ability to be the factory-to-the-world to provide revenue to buy food, or attack its neighbors whose soil and agricultural practices are less damaged.




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*The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service*

*China's changing farms damaging soil and water*

09:30 18 September 04
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe <http://www.newscientist.com/subscribe/subs_home.jsp?promcode=nsnews> and get 4 free issues.

China's economic revolution is coming at a cost. While improved prosperity and government incentives convinced millions of people to give up the rural life and move into towns and cities, China's agriculture is in rapid decline, prompting fears that the country that is home to one-fifth of the world's population will soon be unable to feed itself.

Those fears have been heightened by two new reports by Chinese scientists. They reveal that a national push to encourage farmers to abandon the millennia-old tradition of growing rice in favour of fruit and vegetables is having a profound and detrimental affect on the quality of China's soil and water.

After just five years, fields growing fruit and vegetables are becoming more acidic and barren, while nitrogen and phosphorus levels and fungal epidemics are rising sharply.

Since 1998, the area of land in China devoted to grain crops has fallen by 15 per cent. In August, Beijing confirmed that grain yields have fallen by a fifth in that time, and consumption in 2004 is expected to exceed production by a record 37 million tonnes. This demand for imported grain has triggered a 30 per cent rise in global grain prices in 2004, and further rises are expected as Chinese demand soars.

The root problem is that China is urbanising fast. Already 500 million Chinese live in towns and cities, and the government wants that to rise to 800 million by 2020. Cities are spreading across former farmland and are getting first call on scarce water resources.

They are also changing food markets: while prices for grains such as wheat and rice are capped by the government, city people are willing to pay high prices for fruit and vegetables. And the government is encouraging millions of farmers to meet this soaring demand by converting rice and wheat fields to growing these more profitable crops.


*More acidic*

As a result, in the past decade, farmers have converted 13 million hectares, an area the size of England, to fruit and vegetables. It is this unprecedented change that has triggered the new concern about deteriorating soils.

Researchers from the government's Institute of Soil Science in Nanjing have found that soils in fields converted to growing vegetables are becoming dramatically more acid, with average pH falling from 6.3 to 5.4 in 10 years. Meanwhile nitrates in the soils are at four times previous levels, and phosphate levels are up tenfold (/Environmental Geochemistry and Health/, vol 26, p 97 and p 119).

More on this story

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Institute of Soil Science, Nanjing <http://www.issas.ac.cn/english/index.asp>
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Environmental Geochemistry and Health <http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0269-4042/contents>

The changes in soil chemistry have been accompanied by an equally dramatic decline in soil bacteria and an epidemic of fungus. The deterioration is worst when the crops are grown under plastic.

These changes are starting to hit vegetable yields and quality. "Some plants show abnormal growth, deformed fruits and various plant diseases which are not easy to control by the usual pesticides," says Cao Zhihong of the Institute of Soil Science. There is, in addition, "wide concern because of possible groundwater and well drinking water pollution by leached nitrates and phosphates". Already, a third of well water exceeds government norms for nitrate.

"Anything that disrupts microbial activity and function in soil could be expected to affect long-term soil productivity, and have serious consequences," says Rui Yin, a co-author of the studies.

Western agronomists suggest that changes in soil chemistry are not being caused by growing fruit and vegetables, but by farmers applying too much fertiliser to them. While China harvests a similar amount of the crops to the US, it uses almost twice as much fertiliser, says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in the US and an expert on Chinese agriculture.

Fred Pearce


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  • [Homestead] China ag disaster affects U.S. and world, Tvoivozhd, 09/19/2004

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