Farmland remediation cannot keep up with pollution; the Soil Ten Plan may create an annual market worth 100 billion yuan

Minister of Environmental Protection Chen Jining emphasized on March 16 that the compilation of the “Soil Ten Plan” will be accelerated, and the risk control and remediation of soil pollution will be gradually promoted. Faced with the current situation in which China's farmland remediation projects fall far short of the number of polluted sites, industry insiders say that the domestic soil remediation market scale may reach nearly 700 billion yuan in the next few years.

Farmland remediation cannot keep up with the volume of pollution; the Soil Ten Plan may create an annual market worth 100 billion yuan

“Some places have serious environmental pollution,” Premier Li Keqiang of the State Council admitted in the 2015 government work report, “environmental pollution is a scourge to people's livelihoods and a pain in people's hearts, and it must be tackled with an iron fist.”

Liu Zhengjun, a deputy to the National People's Congress and vice chairman of the China Environmental Protection Association, believes that air and water pollution are visible to everyone and have already attracted widespread attention, and the government has also devoted enormous efforts to tackling them. However, soil pollution is relatively hidden, and among it, farmland pollution is even more a matter of food security, and its remediation is already urgent.

Accelerate the compilation of the “Soil Ten Plan”

This year's Two Sessions is an important meeting held in the key year of comprehensively deepening reform, the opening year of comprehensively advancing the rule of law, and the closing year of fully completing the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan.” Ecological civilization construction and environmental protection are hot issues at the Two Sessions.

On March 16, Minister of Environmental Protection Chen Jining said at the centralized (expanded) study meeting of the Party Leadership Group of the Ministry of Environmental Protection that at present and for a period to come, efforts should be focused on five tasks, including implementing the new Environmental Protection Law, implementing the “Water Ten Plan,” accelerating the compilation of the “Soil Ten Plan,” and carefully compiling the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan.”

In response to the proposals put forward by many deputies and committee members at this year's Two Sessions to strengthen China's soil pollution prevention and control management, the five tasks also made special mention of this. Chen Jining emphasized that the compilation of the “Soil Ten Plan” must be accelerated, and the risk control and remediation of soil pollution must be gradually promoted.

Farmland remediation falls far short of the enormous volume of pollution

With the acceleration of urbanization and the pace of industrial transfer, the original land use functions of cities have changed, and a large amount of industrial land has been converted to commercial land or residential land. In addition, with the adjustment of industrial structure, enterprises producing high-pollution and high-energy-consumption products have shifted production, leaving behind a large number of diverse and complex contaminated sites. These contaminated sites involve many very prominent problems such as soil pollution, groundwater pollution, and waste pollution. Therefore, the remediation and redevelopment of these contaminated sites has become a primary issue.

The 2014 “National Soil Pollution Survey Bulletin” revealed that the overall national soil environmental situation is not optimistic, soil pollution in some areas is relatively serious, and the quality of farmland soil environmental quality is worrying. The overall exceedance rate of national soil sampling points was 16.1%. Among more than 2 billion mu of farmland, nearly 1/5 of the surveyed points were confirmed to be polluted.

In April of the same year, China officially launched comprehensive treatment of heavy metal-polluted farmland remediation, carrying out the first batch of remediation pilots for 1.7 million mu of heavy metal-polluted farmland in the Chang-Zhu-Tan area of Hunan Province (Changsha, Zhuzhou, Xiangtan).

Some reports say that the Chang-Zhu-Tan pilot is currently the only large-scale farmland remediation pilot project implemented in China. In addition, the farmland remediation pilot in Shiping Township, Gulin County, Sichuan Province, the soil pollution treatment pilot at the sweet cherry base in Zongqu Village, and Wanshan District in Tongren City, Guizhou Province, have also included a total of 50,000 mu of farmland in treatment planning.

According to incomplete statistics, the number of farmland remediation projects completed through market behavior is only 7. Adding national pilot projects, farmland remediation projects still account for only about 3% of the total number of soil remediation projects nationwide.

Liu Zhengjun pointed out that farmland remediation projects are not only few in number, but also have the lowest average investment amount, only 1/5 of the average investment amount of site remediation projects and 1/3 of the average investment amount of mining area remediation projects, and the funds mainly come from central government financial subsidies. Obviously, in the face of China's current enormous pollution volume of hundreds of millions of mu, farmland remediation is still far from sufficient in terms of both scale and invested funds.

The soil remediation market can reach 100 billion yuan annually

Domestic securities personnel conservatively estimate that the cost of farmland remediation in China is close to 4 trillion yuan, which does not include urban parcel remediation. According to estimates from sample points in the “National Soil Pollution Survey Bulletin,” its space is 700 billion yuan. The soil remediation industry has maintained a scale of about 20 billion yuan to 30 billion yuan in the past two years. A report released by the Jiangsu Academy of Environmental Industry and Technology predicts that from 2014 to 2020, the domestic soil remediation market scale can reach 685.6 billion yuan, which means that a soil remediation market of 100 billion yuan will be formed each year, and soil remediation faces enormous market space.

The process of soil remediation is quite long. To solve the problem of soil pollution, it requires the joint efforts of multiple disciplines such as soil science, agronomy, and ecology, as well as relevant production units and government decision-makers. In this regard, many industry insiders have said that the soil remediation market in China will become a huge market.

Zhuang Guotai, director of the Ecological Department of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, once revealed, “the current soil treatment market scale is still very small and has not yet started. If we look at soil (treatment) from the perspective of 40 years of development, we will find that once this soil market opens, it will be very large. In rough calculations, trillions or tens of trillions will be needed to solve the soil problem.” It is reported that the United States invested nearly 100 billion US dollars in contaminated soil remediation in the 1990s.