Policy and Technology Are Key to Tackling Livestock Pollution

As awareness of ecological and environmental protection grows and the public demands a better living environment, the environmental pollution caused by livestock and poultry farming has drawn unprecedented public attention and concern. And this is clearly not a problem unique to our country, but a "global" one. Take the Netherlands, an EU country, as an example. The Netherlands and China are both major agricultural countries, and both face the pressure of comprehensively utilizing livestock and poultry farming waste and controlling pollution. As a major decision-making participant in the EU's livestock and poultry farming industry and environmental policy, the Netherlands has developed advanced concepts and experience in clean production technology policy, circular agriculture development models, and pollution prevention and control management policies, which can offer important lessons for our country.

Let us start with legislation. Since the 1970s and 1980s, the Netherlands has successively promulgated and implemented a series of laws and regulations, building a reasonably structured and effective legal framework. These include national laws such as the Animal Manure Act, the Air Quality Plan, the Nature Conservation Act, and the Odor Nuisance Act, which clearly define the environmental protection responsibilities and obligations of the state, provinces, farms, and farming enterprises, and set threshold values or total emission requirements for the discharge of various toxic and harmful gases from poultry houses, pastures, manure storage sites, production rooms, and farmland.

Objectively speaking, although our country started legislating on livestock and poultry farming pollution prevention later than the Netherlands and other EU countries, we have also made notable progress in recent years. The Regulations on the Prevention and Control of Pollution from Large-Scale Livestock and Poultry Farming, officially promulgated and implemented on January 1 of this year, can be said to have epoch-making value and significance. This is because before the Regulations were promulgated, our country had no dedicated national-level laws or regulations on agricultural environmental protection. For a long time, there was no legal basis for supervising livestock and poultry farming pollution prevention, and although individual provisions of laws such as the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law touched on livestock and poultry farming pollution prevention, these provisions suffered from problems such as being too general in nature and lacking specificity and operability, and their practical effect was less than satisfactory.

Although our country has made obvious progress in building laws and regulations, laws and regulations mainly play a restraining and regulating role. When it comes to the practical work of tackling livestock and poultry farming pollution, in addition to restraint and regulation, there must also be necessary technical support and policy guidance, and livestock and poultry farmers must see benefits in the process of handling livestock and poultry manure, thereby stimulating their enthusiasm for pollution prevention. To this end, in addition to actively pushing research institutions to accelerate technological research and development and issuing and implementing the Best Available Techniques for the Prevention and Control of Pollution from Livestock and Poultry Farming, the Dutch government has also implemented proactive and steady guiding fiscal and tax policies.

Specifically, the Netherlands' guiding policies for livestock and poultry farming pollution prevention cover aspects such as innovation in production technology, subsidies for building pollution control facilities, and improvement of animal welfare. For example, fiscal funds support research and development of innovative technologies and management, subsidies and fiscal measures stimulate investment in new technologies, and capacity-building projects such as demonstration projects, technical consulting services, and farmer networks are supported. The implementation of these guiding fiscal and tax policies has greatly reduced the burden on livestock and poultry farmers in pollution prevention and increased their enthusiasm.

At the same time, Dutch research institutions have also conducted whole-process control technology research on farming management, manure collection, and nutrient extraction, highlighting the concept of ecosystem circular economy. We have also made some efforts in this regard, but still only at a small-scale stage. For example, in Changsha County, Hunan Province, in order to achieve harmonious and win-win development of the farming industry and pollution control, the county animal husbandry bureau vigorously promoted a new model of using constructed wetlands to solve farming pollution, achieving both ecological and economic benefits with good results. However, due to natural conditions and technical limitations, it could not be promoted on a larger scale. This shows that in livestock and poultry pollution prevention and ecological recycling, we still need to increase investment in funding and technology to achieve new breakthroughs.

In the final analysis, while acknowledging that some other countries in the world have done better than us in livestock and poultry farming pollution prevention, we should carry forward the spirit that "stones from other hills may serve to polish the jade of this one" -- learning more from their advanced experience, taking fewer detours and more smooth paths, and achieving greater results in livestock and poultry pollution prevention.