Brick kilns used to make clay are responsible for the
destruction of arable lands equivalent to the size of a
medium-sized county each year, said an inspector from the Ministry
of Land and Resources on Sunday.
Inspector Liu Renfu made these remarks at a forum on land
conservation and farming safeguards held to mark National Land Day
which falls every year on June 25.
While brick kilns are built to fuel the clay needs of local
areas, this often comes at the detriment of farmlands, which are
either occupied or wholly destroyed by these intruders. Every year,
China manufactures 800 billion bricks, at the cost of 60 million
tons of coal and 100,000 hectares of farmland. Considering that
China's entire arable land mass amounts to 120 million hectares, a
worrying picture begins to be painted. It transcends into a tragic
chef d'oeuvre because the national per capita area is a mere 0.09
hectare, the lowest in the world at 40 percent below the global
average. The inspector railed against clay consumption, stating it
acted in opposition to the national sustainable development
strategy which focuses on land protection and energy saving.
Statistics show China has occupied 1.75 million hectares of
arable land for production and construction and let more than 6.7
million hectares of cultivated land revert to its natural state
from 1998 to 2006. The agricultural reconstruction has consumed
more than 1.8 million hectares and another 600,000 hectares have
been destroyed during the eight years. Although 3.2 million
hectares has been added through land reclamation and consolidation,
it is still austere for China to stick to the bottom line of 1.2
billion hectares of farmland in near future.
Meanwhile, certain local governments are blithely pursuing their
own economic agendas and construction plans, allowing control
measures such as land protection legislation, examinations and land
use approval mechanisms to fall by the wayside, added
Liu.
Policy makers are faced with a knotty dilemma between protecting
dwindling arable land while also maintaining a steady flow of
materials for economic construction. An answer may lie in the
optimization of industrial scraps recycling into new building
materials, Liu pointed out. In recent years, success has been seen
in this light with over 30,000 clay brick kilns being shut down
while the use of new bricks made from environmentally-friendly
materials has risen by 10 percent, a move credited with saving over
93,000 hectares of land, according to Liu.
(China Youth Daily, translated by Li Shen for
China.org.cn, June 26, 2007)