10,000 Pesticide Deaths in China—and growing ecological devastation

More than 10,000 Chinese farmers died last year from poisoning by substandard pesticides,  one sign of the ecological devastation Beijing is trying to fight with a new environmental action plan. “These chemicals have seriously affected agricultural production, reducing crop output contaminating farm produce and the environment,” the official China Daily quoted an Agricultural Ministry spokesman as saying.

“The health problems caused by this trade are a matter of great concern,” the ministry spokesman was quoted as saying. Many of the more than 10,000 farm workers who, official reports say, died from pesticide poisoning in China in 1993 were victims of home-made chemical cocktails marketed illegally. Often barefoot farmers liberally douse their crops with poisons, neglecting even the most basic safety precautions such as face masks or protective gloves.
    The China Daily said an investigation revealed that 30% of pesticides used in the grain-basket provinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, Hebei and Henan were unlicensed. As a result, the Agriculture Ministry is demanding stricter controls on China’s pesticide production, which directly affects the country’s 800 million agricultural workers. It is requiring pesticide producers and importers to register with the government, and has banned unlicensed products from the market.
    The rash of pesticide poisonings is the largest in a string of statistics detailing the environmental costs of China’s economic booms. Beijing’s environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is putting the final touches on an action plan designed to reduce pollution radically by 2000. EPA planning director Wang Yuqing said the plan would address water and air pollution, soil erosion, low afforestation and species extinction. Major aims are cutting pollutants in water and air, and reducing noise and solid waste pollution in 52 major cities. The plan targets some 9,000 enterprises as 'major polluters'. “China will formulate industrial and economic policies for sustainable development, enhance environmental legislation and law enforcement and improve environmental protection agencies,” the China Daily said of the EPA’s 10 year plan.
    China’s economic boom has strained an environment already struggling to sustain a population of 1.2 billion people. Development officials often turn a blind eye to ecological costs when approving new investment proposals in the hastily-built economic zones. China’s official position is the environmental costs of its rapid growth have not been unsustainable.
    China’s population grows by 15 million each year, while its cultivated land shrinks by 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres) as fields become residential and industrial sites, By 2050 China will be using more fuel and metal each year than the entire world consumed in 1970.

Andrew Quinn, Reuters, 26 January 1994.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 23, March 1994, page 10]