How Can the Rural Environmental Governance Challenge Be Solved? The Key Is to Prescribe the Right Remedy

For China to be beautiful, rural areas must be beautiful. At present, half of China's population still lives in rural areas. How to enable the countryside to "let people see the mountains, see the water, and remember their nostalgia," and to make the vast rural areas a beautiful homeland where farmers can live and work in peace and contentment, has become one of the challenges we urgently need to solve.

This year's Government Work Report proposed strengthening environmental governance with a focus on garbage and sewage, and building beautiful and livable villages. Last year, the General Office of the State Council issued the Guiding Opinions on Improving the Rural Living Environment, proposing that by 2020, the basic living conditions of rural residents nationwide, including housing, drinking water and travel, be significantly improved; the living environment basically achieve cleanliness, tidiness and convenience; and a number of beautiful and livable villages with distinctive features be built. To accomplish this goal, scientifically and rationally solving the problem of rural domestic garbage is the top priority.

At present, solving the rural garbage challenge and effectively improving the rural environment is an important measure for implementing the strategy of coordinated urban and rural development. In recent years, various regions have carried out special campaigns to address rural garbage, increased efforts in sewage treatment and toilet renovation, advanced comprehensive improvement of rural rivers and ponds, and strengthened supervision of the discharge of industrial "three wastes" around rural areas, as part of ecological civilization construction campaigns to improve farmers' living conditions. Certain results have been achieved. However, the problem of dirty, messy and poor rural environments in many parts of China remains far from optimistic. Data show that as of the end of 2013, among the 588,000 administrative villages nationwide, only 218,000, or 37%, treated domestic garbage; 14 provinces were below 30%, and a few provinces were even below 10%. Other data show that rural China has 650 million permanent residents, producing about 110 million tons of domestic garbage annually, of which 70 million tons received no treatment at all, accounting for 63.6% of the total. The problem of rural garbage treatment is extremely urgent.

On analysis, the main reasons for garbage surrounding villages are as follows: First, local attention is insufficient; rural domestic garbage governance has not yet been placed on the agenda of some local governments, and related work such as institution building and division of responsibilities still lags behind. Second, treatment methods are simple and crude; classification-based reduction and resource utilization have not yet been widely implemented, relevant equipment and facilities are seriously insufficient, and more than 70% of treatment methods are relatively rudimentary, with secondary pollution of the "pollute while treating" kind. For example, there is a relatively large amount of toxic and hazardous garbage in rural areas, and discarding it randomly in fields and rivers easily causes environmental pollution; when garbage is piled up for a long time and soaked by rainwater, some toxic and harmful substances pollute water sources and soil; open-air piling of garbage easily breeds mosquitoes and flies and attracts rats, becoming a source of disease transmission; and the strongly carcinogenic substances released when farmers burn garbage pollute the air, which is harmful to the health of both urban and rural residents. Third, the public's enthusiasm for participation is insufficient; in many places it is "the government does the work while farmers watch." Fourth, funds are scarce; governance costs have not been included in local fiscal budgets, and the gap in construction and operating costs is quite large. These reflect that rural environmental governance has fallen far behind the needs of rural economic and social development. Solving this challenge requires "prescribing the right remedy."

To solve the challenge of garbage surrounding villages, the first step is to break the bottleneck constraints of institutional supply and provide a source of living water for institutional innovation. First, establish a funding input mechanism led by the government, with farmer participation and social support; strengthen government public fiscal investment, and use public fiscal funds to guide social funds, gather village funds and absorb villagers' funds, laying a fiscal foundation for institutional innovation; second, expand the scale and concentration of rural garbage governance to improve its economic benefits; third, strengthen publicity and education on garbage governance, raise villagers' awareness and level of garbage governance, and reduce the cost of garbage governance; fourth, accelerate village economic development to accumulate public funds for garbage governance. Second, innovate the garbage governance system to achieve garbage reduction, resource utilization and harmlessness. In terms of institution building, consideration may be given to constructing composite governance entities. Households, villages, townships, counties and higher-level governments jointly bear governance responsibilities. In this process, organizational leadership must be effectively strengthened, and all relevant departments must, under the unified leadership of the government, perform their own duties, take their own responsibilities, actively cooperate and work closely together. In short, only by ensuring institutions, funding, concepts and dedicated management, and by applying multiple measures together, can the challenge of rural garbage treatment truly be solved.