What are the governance countermeasures for the problem of farmers' difficulty in defending their rights amid rural environmental pollution?
While rural development is generally improving, the ecological environment in many rural areas has suffered severe damage. As the direct victims of rural environmental pollution, farmers face an extremely difficult path in defending their environmental rights. To this end, this article aims, on the basis of revealing the serious harm brought by rural environmental pollution, to analyze the problem of farmers' difficulty in defending their rights and propose corresponding governance countermeasures.
I. The serious harm of rural environmental pollution
The interest mechanism of the market economy has penetrated into every corner of society with irresistible force. For the rural economy to develop and farmers to become wealthy, developing township enterprises became the first choice. In this process, some polluting enterprises took the opportunity to settle and produce in many remote villages. Because rural pollution does not attract people's attention as easily as urban pollution, by the time it is discovered and taken seriously, the problem is often already very serious.
1. Water pollution leads to ecological destruction and the emergence of the terrifying “cancer village” phenomenon
As some polluting enterprises transfer to rural areas, highly polluting enterprises such as electroplating plants, paper mills, and electroplating plants discharge wastewater containing harmful substances directly into streams and river channels without treatment. In addition, rural areas have backward infrastructure and lack a complete system for sewage discharge, drainage, and garbage cleanup, causing rural ecology to suffer varying degrees of damage, and ecological imbalance is becoming increasingly serious. Water resource pollution is the source of many diseases and has caused serious harm to the basic rights of vast numbers of farmers in rural areas, including their lives and health. In some severely polluted areas, “ecological refugees” have even appeared. What is especially serious is that, according to relevant statistics, the number of cancer villages in our country has already exceeded 247, covering 27 provinces, with the distribution mainly in the rapidly economically developing eastern coastal provinces. The main cause is pollution wastewater discharged by nearby chemical plants, printing and dyeing plants, paper mills, and other enterprises. According to a World Bank report, the probability of Chinese farmers dying of liver cancer is close to four times the global average, and the probability of dying of stomach cancer is twice the global average.
2. Heavy metal pollution of soil threatens rural food security
For thousands of years, farming has been the traditional industry and largest industry of our country's farmers, but now the farmland on which farmers depend for their livelihood has suffered heavy metal pollution, and the current situation is worrying. Since 2009, our country has seen more than 30 major heavy metal pollution incidents in succession, including cadmium pollution in Liuyang, Hunan; excessive thallium at China Nonferrous Metal Industry's Foreign Engineering and Construction Zhongjin Lingnan; lead pollution in Neijiang, Sichuan; arsenic pollution in Linyi, Shandong; and the dam failure at Zijin Mining in Fujian, all shocking. The 2013 Guangdong “cadmium rice” incident caused an uproar in public opinion, once again raising the issue of heavy metal pollution of farmland. Luo Xiwen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, revealed at the 45th special report meeting of the Guangdong Science and Technology Association Forum: our country has 300 million mu of cultivated land polluted by heavy metals, accounting for one-sixth of the national total farmland; a national sewage irrigation area survey conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture shows that among 1.4 million hectares of polluted irrigation areas, land suffering heavy metal pollution accounts for 64.8% of farmland irrigation area, and 12 million tons of grain are polluted by heavy metals each year, causing direct economic losses of more than 20 billion yuan. Our country is a major agricultural country. The quality of rural grain not only directly affects the stability of rural areas, but also affects national food security.
3. Rural environmental pollution triggers mass incidents and affects social stability
Pollution caused by enterprise emissions leads to pollution, farmers' rights defense results are limited, and it is easy for them to adopt group-style “troublemaking.” The government sends police to maintain order, and with the slightest carelessness this triggers police-civilian conflicts and other mass incidents. In 2005, Zhejiang Province saw two typical mass incidents: farmers in Huashui Town, Dongyang City collectively protesting serious pollution by local chemical enterprises, and more than 10,000 farmers in Xinchang County protesting environmental pollution by Jingxin Pharmaceutical. In 2007, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region saw a typical incident in which villagers in Botang Town, Cenxi City protested pollution discharge by Zhongtaifu Paper Co., Ltd. Environmental problems are not only civil issues; they can also trigger political issues and have an enormous impact on social stability. In recent years, mass incidents caused by environmental problems have continued to increase, becoming a major issue that triggers social conflict, affects the economy, and restricts social development.
No country worldwide has faced such serious environmental pollution. Recently, Qu Geping, the first director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said that if environmental pollution is not eliminated and the ecological environment is not protected, the Party and the state will perish. Rural environmental problems have reached a point where they must be taken seriously. Events such as cancer villages caused by water pollution and cadmium rice caused by soil pollution are all shocking.
II. Manifestations of farmers' difficulty in defending environmental rights
At the present stage, the main ways for our country's farmers to defend their environmental rights are litigation and non-litigation channels. Litigation refers to the parties whose environmental rights and interests have been harmed using legal means to assert their lawful rights and interests, including civil litigation, criminal litigation, and administrative litigation. Non-litigation methods refer to means other than litigation, including petitions, mediation, settlement, negotiation, consultation on safeguarding environmental rights and interests, and media information support.
1. Difficulty in defending rights through litigation
For villagers, if they want to seek judicial relief, they often use civil litigation to submit demands to the people's court, but this path is not easy for villagers. 1) Difficulty in collecting evidence. Evidence is the cornerstone of litigation and plays an extremely important role in litigation outcomes. Because of factors such as their own educational level, farmers usually do not have the awareness to collect environmental pollution evidence. The collection of environmental pollution evidence sometimes requires the use of scientific and technological means, which ordinary people cannot do by hand, and in addition there is the economic cost required to collect evidence. All of this easily leads farmers to give up the judicial path because they cannot provide evidence. 2) Difficulty in filing a case. Most township enterprises are pillar enterprises of the local government and play a decisive role in local economic development, and therefore receive the local government's attention and protection, making it easy for administrative power to intervene in the judiciary. When farmers sue in court because of disputes with township enterprises over environmental pollution, at the case-filing stage some courts respond to farmers' rights defense by citing problems with the plaintiff's evidence or by creating obstacles through delays, stifling farmers' rights defense at the filing stage. 3) Difficulty in obtaining judicial fairness. Compared with villagers, enterprises obviously have more strength and social capacity. After an environmental litigation case is filed, the defendant enterprise will naturally rely on its own strength to pressure the court through various channels, pushing itself into a relatively advantageous position in the contest with farmers' interests, and trading harm to farmers' interests for the enterprise's development. In addition, a very small number of judges hold the view of valuing politics over law and are cautious about protecting themselves, making it difficult for farmers' environmental rights and interests to be protected. 4) Difficulty in judicial enforcement. In litigation over environmental pollution incident disputes, even if farmers win, enforcement of the judgment is still a problem. Many enterprises refuse to pay compensation and adopt measures such as transferring assets or applying for bankruptcy to evade judicial enforcement. By the time the court judgment takes effect, the enterprise has no assets left to enforce, which affects many farmers' confidence in and choice of the litigation path.
2. Difficulty in defending rights through non-litigation channels
Article 41, Paragraph 2 of the Environmental Protection Law provides: “Disputes over liability for compensation and the amount of compensation may, according to the request of the parties, be handled by the competent department of environmental protection administration or another department exercising environmental supervision and management power in accordance with legal provisions; if the parties are dissatisfied with the handling decision, they may bring a lawsuit to the people's court. The parties may also directly bring a lawsuit to the people's court.” It can be seen that the law also advocates a “dual-track” relief mechanism of mediation and litigation.
Litigation is time-consuming and laborious, which prompts villagers, after their rights are infringed, to directly seek out the polluting enterprise or communicate with the infringer through the local government to demand compensation. However, in the face of polluting enterprises, the victims are obviously disadvantaged. Because our country's mediation system is not sound, although mediation of environmental infringement can reduce the victims' litigation burden and improve judicial efficiency, it cannot avoid the problem that because the victims are in a disadvantaged position and the two sides are unequal, the victims face enterprises whose financial strength is a hundred times greater. Enterprises can obtain more relevant legal information through legal counsel, while victims can only rely on their own limited knowledge and, without any legal aid, negotiate with the enterprise alone. When victims are seriously ill, and these ill people are often poor members of families, in order to obtain timely compensation they often accommodate themselves to the situation, and polluters use this weakness to reduce the compensation amount to the minimum. In certain specific circumstances, such as when the polluting enterprise has very poor performance or is even on the brink of bankruptcy, or has already gone bankrupt, then the victims have even less basis to claim compensation. It can be seen that under our country's current legal system, it is not easy for villagers to achieve the goal of solving the problem through the simplest consultation and mediation.
III. Reasons for farmers' difficulty in defending environmental rights
In the litigation process of farmers defending their environmental rights, there are both reasons stemming from farmers themselves and constraints from other objective factors.
1. Subjective reasons for farmers' difficulty in defending environmental rights
Farmers' awareness of defending rights is weak. Overall, as a disadvantaged group in society, farmers have a low level of education and receive relatively little environmental protection knowledge and legal knowledge. At present, the rural economy in many places is developing rapidly and farmers' living standards have clearly improved, but farmers' education level is still relatively low, and their environmental awareness remains weak. When vast numbers of rural villagers safeguard their own rights and interests, it is difficult for them to form initiative and persistence in environmental rights defense, and farmers' interest demands are difficult to guarantee as they should be.
Farmers' social capacity is limited. In environmental pollution cases, the plaintiffs are mostly disadvantaged farmers, who have neither sufficient professional knowledge nor enough economic strength to hire relevant lawyers to provide help, while the defendant polluting enterprises have relatively strong economic strength and possess the funds, talent, and professional knowledge needed for litigation, which also places the plaintiffs in an unfavorable litigation position. Environmental rights defense is a high-cost action, and evidence collection and appraisal are very difficult, while causation is even harder to prove. When the conditions for evidence collection are met, the amount of expected compensation determines whether they take the litigation path. Economic cost is undoubtedly a major obstacle for farmers in environmental rights defense, restricting farmers' rights defense, and many farmers therefore give up the legal path.
2. Objective reasons for farmers' difficulty in defending environmental rights
(1) Local governments' misplaced thinking on development and the environment. In order to pursue political achievements, local government leaders find it difficult to introduce enterprises that can both promote economic growth and protect the environment. In the dilemma between pursuing rapid local economic development and environmental protection, they more often sacrifice the environment. First, environmental issues have become a topic of great concern to the government, the public, and social organizations. People have already recognized the importance of environmental value, but there are still differences and conflicts around development and environmental protection, manifested as conflicts between local governments' GDP-first approach and farmers' environmental interests, and conflicts between enterprise economic benefits and farmers' living environment. Second, the existence of our country's urban-rural dual economic structure has not only caused a widening wealth gap between urban and rural areas and unbalanced regional development, but has also caused imbalance in urban and rural environmental protection. For a long time, when environmental protection was mentioned, the main consideration was urban and industrial pollution, while rural environmental pollution governance was ignored. Third, the government's assessment mechanism for environmental protection responsibility is not sound enough, and the government's accountability system for environmental responsibility is not complete enough. The pursuit of economic growth directly leads the government to neglect environmental protection policies and to play down farmers' environmental rights defense.
(2) Environmental law enforcement is constrained by local authorities. Local governments' approach of pursuing political achievements not only directly leads to a development approach that sacrifices the environment, but also intervenes in and suppresses environmental law enforcement. Our country has already formed unified legal norms for environmental protection, but local governments' enforcement of these norms is uneven, resulting in different environmental pollution situations. When environmental accidents occur, local governments protect these high-pollution major taxpayers by covering up for them, while environmental protection departments, under the restraint of local governments, cannot effectively enforce the provisions of relevant laws and regulations. Apart from collecting a little pollution discharge fee in normal times, their main function is to become a “resolution department” that helps the local government make big issues small and small issues disappear when environmental pollution incidents occur, saying false things such as “the impact on the environment is not significant.” Some environmental protection bureaus have become “pollution protection bureaus.” In recent years, many rural environmental pollution cases were not investigated and handled by the government's environmental protection departments, and were not even first discovered by environmental protection departments; many were reported by villagers and then exposed by the media.