Farmers using excess chemicals
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Chinese farmers are using double the amount of chemicals than their peers in most developed countries, the Legal Daily reported yesterday.
And they are using 100 times more fertilizer compared to 60 years ago.
Over the past 20 years, a million tons of chemicals have been sprayed on crops in China, Jiang Gaoming, a researcher with the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the newspaper.
"The use of chemicals is threatening food safety and polluting the soil and underground water," he said.
"The use of fertilizer per hectare should be kept under 225 kilograms according to the international standard, but Chinese farmers use 434.3 kilograms per hectare," he said.
Jiang said various chemicals were also widely used in livestock production.
With the use of hormones, chickens and ducks can be grown to maturity in as short a time as 28 days while pigs could be ready to be eaten within two and half months of birth, he said.
Jiang said at least half of the chemicals used were unnecessary, such as the plant hormone found in watermelons in Jiangsu Province in east China.
He said the utilization ratio of farm chemicals was about 40 percent in China; the rest became pollutants.
Jiang said more than 10 million hectares of farmland or nearly 10 percent of the country's total farmland had been polluted.
"The poisonous substances in the farm chemicals will eventually be absorbed by human bodies via food chains," he said.
Apart from the chemicals, the country's farmland was also being polluted by waste water from heavy industry, Jiang said. About 2.2 million hectares of farmland and 70 percent of rivers in the country had been polluted by industrial sewage, he told the newspaper.
He urged farmers to use animal manure as fertilizer instead of chemicals, given that the country produces some 2.7 billion tons of animal waste annually.
This natural fertilizer had been wasted because the livestock breeding industry was separate from the agricultural industry, the researcher said.
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