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One Tenth of China's Farmland Polluted With Heavy Metals
eldavojohn writes "A report form China's Environmental Ministry reveals that one tenth of China's 1.22 million square kilometers of farmland are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins. The AFP lists 'lead, mercury and cancer-causing cadmium' and points to the rapid pace of China's industrialization as well as factories and their operators flouting regulations and laws. Cheap batteries and lead refineries are slowly turning China into a land where whole villages are poisoned (11 incidents so far this year). According to Human Rights Watch the government's response to this scourge is laughable. The poisoned are denied treatment and China's Environmental Ministry offers no possible help: 'The report documents how local authorities in contaminated areas have imposed arbitrary limits on access to blood lead testing, for example by permitting only people living within a small radius of a factory to be tested. When tests are conducted, results have often been contradictory or have been withheld from victims and their families. And children with elevated blood lead levels who require treatment according to national guidelines have been denied care or told simply to eat certain foods, including apples, garlic, milk, and eggs.'"
Heavy metal was everywhere back then.
If you need to get rid of it, just bring in some grunge and hip-hop groups.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This sort of thing combined with Chinaâ(TM)s very questionable use of banned pesticides and other sketchy farming chemicals is why I do not by food products marked as being from China. I know that many of the other âoeready madeâ food that I eat probably has ingredients from China, but at least I can reduce the amount of poisons I intake. I try to buy local produce, organic when I can, but this tends to be a little spendy. And of course avoiding processed foods and actually making real food in the kitchen goes a long way to avoid the poisonous crap that China exports.
Of course, there are some of the same issues here, but far far fewer.
Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away with, this is how the United States would be as well.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Look for Chinese labor movements. The Poles were able to do it in the face of oppression. Maybe the Chinese can also.
And to think some working men think unions are a bad thing.
China doesn't care what anybody else thinks, we can't realistically threaten to boycott them (what are you reading this on, and where was it made?) and they essentially control the dollar and are making big inroads into the Euro as well.
This is a domestic Chinese problem, and it will be solved when the people of China decide to deal with their government one way or another. Until then all we can do is wring our hands and cry "Oh, the seething hordes of yellow sort-of-humanity! Oooh, new iPads!"
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Implausible. Heavy metal poisoning is only modestly fatal, either at alarming doses or if you draw the short straw in the carcinogen lottery; but has a huge band of unpleasant but nonfatal effects at lower doses.
With uncontrolled emissions into the environment, you would likely see a uselessly small die-off, largely among people with occupational exposure, and a huge number of subtly to seriously impaired people with cognitive issues, chronic health problems, or both. Killing nearly nobody and creating a large number of chronically sick people is not exactly a clever population control strategy, even if you don't have any ethical reservations about it...
Do you know that the average Chinese farm contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer? Would you EAT a rectal thermometer? Well I would. Ah, mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.
under Soviet rule. You haven't seen environmental horrors until you see what they did under Soviet rule, where not only the people bend to the will of the government so will the land. Of how production results are all that mattered, not how it was done. Where you had rivers you could not walk next to. (some might point to Cleveland and such but we ain't holding a candle to some places I have seen over there).
So, keep your derogatory and misinformed slights about the Tea Party and Republicans out of this, what you are witnessing is the same thing that happened under the Soviets in the 50s through 80s. You are witnessing so much government that it is not answerable to anyone.
Let me give you a hint, our government is close to that now, the only difference is not so much environmental impact but the damage it is doing to our society.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"The poisoned are denied treatment and China's Environmental Ministry offers no possible help."
Dude, I HAVE HEAVY METALS POISONING. I've been in chelation therapy for 14 years and NOBODY does anything to help. Check Medicare, Medicade, any insurance company and you will see that support for heavy metals poisoning is nowhere to be found. Ask your doctor to do a simple RBC minerals assay to check for heavy metals and watch the blank expression on his face in reaction. I'm doing my therapy all on my own.
Heavy metals CAUSE CANCER. Why aren't people being screened for heavy metals when cancer is suspected?
UN FUCKING BELIEVABLE.
One of the interesting aspects of globalization is a lot of restaurant food (Mostly Asian for now) is starting to come from china. There's no disclosure requirements there. Makes one think twice before heading off to the low cost Chinese buffet.
I would also say, don't assume organics gets you out of dodgy Chinese agricultural goods. At one point Whole Foods was sourcing their frozen "Organic" vegetables from China. An acquaintance of mine with USDA out of Beijing mission finds that extremely laughable. Since it's their job to visit farms and see the conditions they won't eat any of the food in China. Everything they eat is imported from US or Europe.
Russia thought of it, but we were big exporters at the time, so they couldn't implement it.
They're lucky we didn't think of it, or the soviet union probably would have collapsed.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The simple solution would be instead of "all goods manufactured in US must obey blah blah blah regulation" we use "all goods sold in US must obey blah blah blah regulation".
Of course our corporate overlords will never allow this pass to in congress.
Almost all the apple juice sold in the United States has some concentrate from China. And SO many people give apple juice to their children. Also apple juice concentrate is used to sweeten other beverages "naturally" like cranberry and lemonade and fruit punch. Fortunately Ocean Spray recently switched to using cane and beat sugar to sweeten their cranberry juice. They previously used high fructose corn syrup which can contain mercury depending on how it is manufactured.
Maybe: ..Not a chance
- stick with your current phone for 4 years?
- skip your next computer upgrade for 5 years?
- settle on a 24" LCD instead of the 92" plasma?
It's disturbing that we've put our own neck in the noose but just keep tightening the rope.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
China has no pollution controls installed AND RUNNING. They purposely disable pollution controls contrary to their agree with Japan.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I blame offshoring of manufacturing services. Offshoring has proven a boon to industries that wish to export their toxic manufacturing processes and slave-labour "wages" to foreign countries. Can you think of any cases where the "cheap" manufacturing wasn't accompanied by lax employee and environmental safety regulations?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Paradoxically, the answer is more industrialization, not less. History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000. Below that number, citizens care more about the fundamental basic needs, and would rather have more money than a cleaner environment. As the citizenry gets richer, they start to care more about the environment they live in and demand that their government does something about it, and are willing to sacrifice some income to achieve it.
Luckily, China can take advantage of technological process, and will likely never be as bad as countries that industrialized earlier. No place ever has been or ever will be as polluted as London was in the late 1800s.
Aral Sea pollutes you!
It's nice to see people in the West finally discussing this. Has it become, at long last, no longer be possible to exempt China (and others) from Kyoto with a straight face?
This conversation has been a long time coming.
Erecting domestic regulatory regimes while exporting our industrial base and its pollution to Asia is hypocritical. We have a moral obligation to correct this. Another consequence of this hypocrisy is a rapidly widening wealth gap between our now surplus working class and everyone else. We have a fiscal imperative to correct this, one you can observe at the Port of Oakland right now. Cheap, plentiful imports flooding mega-stores with shiny disposable stuff has created an ugly consumer culture. We have a cultural need to correct this. The Asian escape valve has permitted us to indulge NIMBY-ism via our bureaucracies and the abuse or our civil law by pressure groups. We're all going to have to grow up a bit to correct this.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
That's how this pollution happens. They rake in all of the profit, but the expenses in environmental safety are left for everyone to pay.
Simple capitalism: They can keep the profit it they also assume the expenses. Regulation is required only so far as to make sure they assume their rightful expenses, to keep things capitalist.
Vote republican! Save us from the authoritarian nanny state by installing a theocracy!
I think it's hilarious that you believe that we've been bankrupted by Democrats.
Who exploded the deficit in the 1980s in an attempt to out-spend the Soviet Union?
Who inherited government surpluses at the turn of the century and then instead of paying down the debt, passed trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts?
Who led us into a controversial and optional multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq? (Some might ask the same thing about Afghanistan.)
Who passed and signed Medicare Part D (the prescription drug program) without even attempting to pay for it?
Protip: The things that you are told on talk / shortwave radio, in church, on Fox News, etc. are not always true. In some cases, these people are filling you full of complete fabrications. You are allowed to think for yourself, do your own objective research, and come to your own conclusions. Be warned, however, that these conclusions may represent a drastic departure from the insular dogma of your particular echo chamber.
I'm sorry, but this is just naive. The problem we have is that we do not punish politicians for doing evil. This is true both of the Republicans and the Democrats. I won't argue that the Democrats will save us from overspending, because unfortunately they waste nearly as much money as the Republicans. But if you want to see a change, stop painting this as Republican versus Democrat. It's not. It's competent governance versus graft. Show up at the primaries. Pay attention to what the candidate did in office last time. If they voted for graft, and against competence, fire them by voting for their opponent in the primary. If neither candidate is an incumbent, look at what they did in their previous job. Think about it critically. Don't listen to their ads: pay attention to what they did in the past. Try your best to figure out if they really want to govern, or if they just want a ride on the gravy train. Vote accordingly.
It's absolutely sickening how few voters show up for primary elections these days. And it's absolutely sickening how little thought and effort they seem to put into their votes (if what you said above is anything to judge by). Stop being a sheep. Be a citizen.
While commercial properties have been privatized farmland is still communal, so who can claim damages?
This situation won't improve until the Chinese reject authoritarianism and demand a free society.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
The U.S. and China have the exact same land area, but they have four times the population. We should be doing the selling.
I am an environmental scientist in Australia. A widely employed and growing trend is to take the solids from waste water treatment plants and dump them on farmland with minimal processing. Currently the theory is that although these fertilizers are high in metals, they won't become quite as bioavailable because plants won't take them up readily.
There's research into the resulting quality of food, but not as much as you might expect. We'll have to wait and see pretty much.