Pesticide use in China -
a health and safety concern

In November, the UK Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) held a conference addressing the problems and challenges facing Chinese agriculture with particular reference to pesticide use.

Chinese government policy is shifting towards a greater reliance on intensive agriculture that will result in more imports of machinery and farm chemicals. The current Chinese population of 1.2 billion may increase to 1.5 billion by the year 2025. The task of providing food for this number of people will become more difficult because of the increasingly large urban populations.
    Although very difficult to estimate, the total cultivated land in China is about 150 million ha. This may seem like a vast area, but China accommodates a quarter of the world's population on only 7% of the world's arable land. There has also been a large loss of agricultural land and there are problems of soil quality. Currently agricultural land is disappearing at the rate of 0.5 million ha per year. The Chinese authorities have responded to these problems by encouraging more intensive agriculture. Imports of some food commodities are likely to increase. By the year 2000 China could be importing about 8-12% of annual grain consumption that amounts to about 40 million tonnes.

Hazardous pesticide mixing operation in Western China. Photo: Graham Matthews
The pesticides market
Estimates of pesticide use in China are very difficult to make, and figures are probably subject to some error. According to Hong Chuanyi of the Nanshen Chemical Company, China produced 250,000 tonnes of pesticide active ingredient in 1995 that was equivalent to 1.5 million tonnes of formulated product. Currently China imports pesticides worth US$ 150 million per year, and exports a similar amount of OP-dominated pesticides, through Hong Kong. Recent estimates of use in the domestic market indicate that insecticides account for about 74%, herbicides 13%, fungicides 10% and others 3%. In 1995, there were 218 pesticide active ingredients on the Chinese market.
    Quality control is a huge problem in China. About 30% or 70,000 tonnes of active ingredient end up wasted because of inferior quality. At present, according to Hong Chuanyi the only quick way to improve quality is to import pesticides.

Health and safety
Since the early 1980s, pesticide use has increased dramatically in China. This has had an impact on the health of operators, and pest and disease resistance to many chemicals is now widespread.
    Pesticide manufacturers such as Zeneca, in co-operation with the Chinese government, have made suggestions for improvement but it is a daunting task to put over pesticide safety messages in such a huge country.
    Prof Graham Matthews of Imperial College reported on the lack of health and safety awareness in China. He has visited many agricultural operations in recent years and has witnessed poor standards and many instances of inappropriate pesticide application. He told delegates: "I have never seen personal protective equipment worn in China." He also reported he had never seen pesticide calibration being carried out-so application rates invariably were guessed at. Operators regularly performed hazardous operations such as decanting organophosphate insecticides, and other WHO Class I pesticides, using bottle tops for measuring from un-marked bottles. Most spray machines in China are very basic knapsack lever-operated types, often not having proper nozzles. Chinese factories produce about eight million of these machines per year. They are of an inferior quality and often break down and leak pesticide formulation onto the operator.
    Prof Matthews concluded by saying that WHO Class I pesticides-the most acutely toxic pesticides-are too hazardous to use in China with such sprayers.

SCI, Crop Protection in China, 18 November 1996.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 34, December 1996, page 18]