Agricultural ecological pollution: how can China curb it?
In recent years, ecological disasters have not been encouraging. What everyone still remembers vividly is the freezing disaster of 2008, then the Wenchuan earthquake. Before people had recovered from the Wenchuan earthquake, the Yushu earthquake in Qinghai happened, and people were stunned once again. After that, heaven made you endure the scorching heat of drought: sustained drought appeared in the southwest. Before the drought seemed to have gone far, floods followed one after another around May, and 15 provinces including Jiangxi, Hunan, Henan, Jilin and Guangdong again broke out in large-scale floods. Before the floods had been dealt with, the catastrophic mudslide in Zhouqu, Gansu, happened. It let you suffer disasters to the fullest. Last year we also endured sustained high temperatures from which we had not awakened from the nightmare. The weather was abnormally severe, sometimes scorching heat, sometimes thunder and lightning; even indoors one felt some terror. Such weather was rarely seen in ordinary times, but in recent years it has become common. Violent storms and rainstorms triggered floods, mudslides and landslides, and how many people's lives did they take!
This is a warning sent by nature to humanity. Why does nature punish humanity without mercy?
This autumn, winter and spring continuous drought went from the initial “not seen for many years” to “not seen in 50 years”, “not seen in 60 years”, “not seen in 80 years”, and all the way to the present “not seen in a century”. Yet they occurred in succession? Either flooding first and then drought, with drought and flood turning abruptly, as if heaven had gone mad. In fact, if we think carefully, we should not shift the blame to heaven; many of these disasters are made by people themselves.
On the one hand, reckless logging and deforestation have destroyed nature's ecological balance, and mountains once covered in green have been replaced by barren land. Vegetation cannot hold back surging rainstorms, and at the turn of this spring and summer in the south, floods continue to occur. When faced with floods, there is no better option than moving away, especially for residents living in low-lying areas, who face such scenes every year and have become accustomed to them. Moving away once a year is also taken as normal, but 2011 was even worse: floods struck homes again and again, and the losses caused by repeated floods were incalculable. Many floods are once in decades, once in 50 years or once in several hundred years, but since we were born, we have experienced many such floods.
The market economy has made people more greedy. For money they disregard ecology, and they want to cut down all the trees they depend on for survival and turn them into cash in their pockets. Therefore, villages nestled among trees have disappeared. In the past, rural areas were in a beautiful environment shaded by trees, while cities were monotonous with tall buildings and asphalt roads. Now it is the opposite: cities have more trees, rural areas have none. In any village where people live in concentrated groups, let alone woods, it is hard to find even a few decent large trees. Only farmers living scattered can luxuriously enjoy the pleasure of having trees, and wildflowers and wild grasses are even more extinct in rural areas. No amount of money can restore the forests that once existed.
Chinese university professor Sun Xiliang said that “shortsighted forest tenure reform” is a new round of movement destroying the environment. I do not deny the short-term economic benefits of forest tenure reform in certain places, but it will inevitably bring a fatal impact on the living environment of the Chinese people, and it will be our descendants who pay for today's reckless actions.
Because of reckless logging and deforestation, forest coverage in many places has declined, in some places by more than half, and in some places the forests have been completely cut down, causing massive soil erosion, silted riverbeds, and loss of ecological balance, forming years of floods and droughts. A television news report on August 28, 2011 said that in the forest region of western Sichuan, after more than 20 years of reckless logging, forest area decreased from 30% to just over ten percent, and the sediment flowing into the Yangtze River reached 10 billion tons each year. Restoring it to the level before logging would take more than 100 years.
On the other hand, the ecology of the land is also constantly deteriorating. Because farmers have long used excessive chemical fertilizers on the land, and the amount increases year after year, the land becomes more compacted year after year, fertility is exhausted, and harvests are worse year after year. Yet farmers do not consider the long term and only pursue immediate interests. In the past, farmers composted green manure in their own fields and applied farmyard manure. Now, although pig manure and cow dung are everywhere in front of and behind the village, no one collects it. Farmers basically no longer use these organic fertilizers that improve the soil, and instead use chemical fertilizers and pesticides indiscriminately. The scientization of agricultural production materials only pollutes farmland and makes farmers lazier. They seek comfort, save time and effort by farming lazily, and the time saved is spent either playing cards or working away from home. They are unwilling to invest in the land, and even do not love the land; they only take from it. If this continues, the land will degrade and agriculture will collapse. Some farmers even plant poplars in their fields and then the whole family goes out to work. A perfectly good piece of farmland is ruined once trees are planted on it, and afterward it can never be cultivated permanently. Even if it is later reclaimed, it cannot hold water when transplanting rice seedlings. The reduction of grain-producing land will threaten national food security. Even foreign experts have issued a warning: “Who will feed China in the twenty-first century?”
⟦NL> In China's rural areas, especially in the vast central and western regions, most farmers' input into production is still concentrated on land and labor. What is generally adopted is extensive expanded reproduction and extensive management. The phenomena of wide sowing but low yield, overgrazing, and reckless logging still exist, causing great damage to the ecological environment and leading to intensified natural disasters such as soil erosion, land desertification, salinization, drought and flood, thereby weakening the capacity for sustainable agricultural development.
Therefore, agricultural production resources are scarce, and the agricultural ecological environment is deteriorating day by day.
Although advances in science and technology have raised the development of productive forces, they have also produced laziness among farmers, and most farmers have come to farm lazily. In the past, lush green grass grew on the field slopes. If it was cut with a sickle and composted in the field, it was excellent farmyard manure. Now farmers seek to save labor and time, and simply spray the herbicide “Roundup” once, and the grass on the field slopes withers and dies completely, even the roots rot. They do not realize that grass roots hold the field slopes together. Once the grass roots rot, the field slopes have no grass roots to hold them, and when a rainstorm comes, the field slopes collapse one after another, a large patch at a time. After being struck by water and covered by sand, half of a terraced field is destroyed. Because each household works alone, farmers have no labor to repair it and can only let it be ruined. If this continues, farmland area will continuously decrease, and farmers will have no land to farm. The consequences are endless. Because farmers rely excessively on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and keep increasing the amount, the land gradually becomes compacted, the soil continuously degrades, and the agricultural ecological environment continuously worsens. How will we ensure agricultural harvests in the future? How will we achieve agricultural modernization?
From the long-term perspective of agricultural development, the state should control the use of the pesticide “Roundup”. “Roundup” is highly toxic. Although its weeding effect is good, its residues are severe and pollution is severe, with harm but no benefit. If it contaminates rice and vegetables, people who eat them suffer chronic poisoning. Then if livestock such as cattle, sheep and pigs eat green fodder and rice straw contaminated by the pesticide, they too suffer chronic poisoning. And if people eat pork, beef and mutton, do they also suffer chronic poisoning? Why are there more and more people with various difficult and complicated diseases, strange diseases and cancer? Why are cancer villages all over China? Is this related to agricultural pollution? Because the land is polluted, the grain grown from toxic land is naturally toxic. The author once attended the 2011 International New Fertilizer Conference held in Shanghai. At the conference, experts said that when chemical fertilizer is spread on fields, only a small part is absorbed by crops, and most remains in the soil. It not only pollutes the land but also causes land compaction and land degradation. If this continues, how can agriculture be sustained? When pesticides are applied to crops, some also remains on the crops. Whether it is serious or not, we can tell by observing the organisms in paddy fields. In the past, field ditches were full of fish, shrimp and loaches; now they have all disappeared. People have always been calling for ecological agriculture, but in reality no one has grasped the obvious agricultural pollution, and everyone has ignored some specific problems that exist. If this continues for a long time, where is Chinese agriculture heading?