Straw Burning Management: Better to Guide Than to Ban

According to media reports, as the rice harvest season approaches, in order to prevent some farmers from randomly burning straw in the fields, which produces thick smoke that pollutes the environment and leads to the appearance of smog, Qingcheng District recently launched a one-month campaign to “prohibit straw burning and protect the ecological environment.” As of now, no straw burning has been found in Qingcheng District.

In earlier years, farming households used straw as firewood or to feed livestock, but nowadays many farming households have improved living conditions, using electricity or liquefied gas to cook and boil water, and fewer cattle, sheep and other livestock are raised, so what was once a “treasure” has become a burden, and the simplest solution is to just burn it. This situation is all too common in Qingyuan.

Because the smoke from straw burning contains large amounts of pollutants and particulate matter such as PM2.5 and PM10, causing a marked decline in air quality, local governments have also been advocating a ban on straw burning. Even so, while it has been blocked in the suburbs around the urban area, it has “reared its head” again in the counties under the jurisdiction, and air pollution may “bring disaster to the innocent fish in the moat”; if straw burning is banned only in the urban area, the final result will be nothing more than “still no use.”

Returning straw to the field is a practice advocated by the state in recent years, but in reality ordinary people do not buy into it. For example, Suqian City in Jiangsu once achieved zero fire point records under national satellite remote sensing monitoring for two consecutive years, and its main approach was to implement straw return to the field. However, after on-the-ground investigation, farmers generally reported that after returning straw to the field, there seemed to be more and more insects in the field, the corn was bitten so badly that it stopped growing, and the straw also hindered corn seeds from taking root downward, so many seedlings could not grow tall. The reason is that our country still lacks suitable crushing machinery, and the straw is not crushed finely enough to degrade in time, which brings various harms. Specifically in Qingyuan, few farming households are willing to spend money to deal with straw that they regard as neither worth keeping nor worth discarding.

In my view, if we merely ban straw burning across the board, it is very difficult to achieve the goal. We might as well temporarily set aside our resentment and anxiety about straw burning and return to common sense: straw is burned because there is no better way to dispose of it, which forces government departments to sincerely and patiently find more efficient conversion methods and more reasonable outlets for straw. This is the increasingly valued comprehensive utilization of straw, and many places already have useful attempts, though still greater effort needs to be invested.

From this perspective, relying solely on the single remedy of “banning” to cure the stubborn disease of “straw burning” is not advisable; what is more crucial is guidance. For example, cultivate and support leading enterprises in straw utilization to realize the conversion of straw into biomass energy; the government should arrange special funds and guide society and enterprises to raise funds on their own for the research and development of straw collection, storage and transportation technologies and equipment, the purchase of facilities, system development and the construction of demonstration point projects, and formulate subsidy policies for straw collection, transportation and utilization. Once the outlet for straw is cleared, the disappearance of burning will naturally follow as a matter of course.