A Chinese fish farm's demand for compensation from a pig farm illustrates the competition for China's overburdened natural resource base and the power vested in courts by vague assignment of property rights.
The Changjiang Daily reported that a fish-farming company went to court to seek compensation for loss of fish they blamed on wastewater dumped in the river by an upstream swine breeding farm. After large numbers of the company's fish died during June-October 2018, the fish company and the swine farm both filed a request with the local fishery supervisory commission to investigate the cause and evaluate the losses.
The Ministry of Agriculture's Central-Upper Yangtze River Fishery Environmental Monitoring Center reported in December 2018 that the river's water quality suffered from serious ammonia-nitrogen, chemical oxygen demand, and eutrophication due to the long-term violation of regulations by the swine farm's discharge of wastewater. The initial court judgment ordered the breeding farm company to pay 2.32 million yuan to the fish company.
The swine farm appealed the judgment. The swine farm pointed out that the river had suffered from severe eutrophication since 2010 and that the fish company routinely lost fish every year. In most years the fish losses were small, and the two companies settled the losses through private mediation. In 2014, the managers of an "agricultural park" set up a formal mechanism for the swine farm to pay an annual 180,000-yuan "water adjustment fee" to fund compensation for the fish farm's losses. The unusually large loss during 2018 prompted the fish company to file the legal complaint.
The court's investigation found that the fish company had collected funds from the "water adjustment fee" as compensation in previous years, had never filed a complaint until 2018, and had not regularly monitored water quality. The appeal judgment issued this month determined that the swine farm was at fault for the 2018 fish kill, but found that the fish company was responsible for bearing 20 percent of the loss. The appellate judge slashed the fish farm's compensation to 1.86 million yuan.
China's farm families once used animal manure and canal mud to fertilize fields, fed pigs food scraps and mash from liquor distilleries, burned crop stalks in their stoves, and only ate meat on special occasions. Today, all these activities are uncoupled, and by-products that were once valued resources have become wastes. Soaring agricultural production in an increasingly-stressed ecosystem means not only that water and land are degraded, but different agricultural activities often impinge on one another. The communist system has long been obsessed with maximizing production statistics without regard for broader social impacts or sacrifice of future productivity.
Pigs have been a growing problem that has mostly gotten lip service since the 1990s. The idea of banning pig farms in environmentally sensitive areas, residential areas, and near roads was first included in a 2006 livestock law. It was never widely implemented until 2014 when China's State Council and Ministries of Environmental Protection and Agriculture introduced a series of laws, regulations and action plans to close pig farms in zones near bodies of water and residential areas. The Yangtze River region where this pig farm is located was one of the regions specifically targeted by these plans to control pig-manure pollution. News media featured triumphant images of pig farms being destroyed to save the environment, yet this farm was allowed to continue operating and dump effluent into a river that was already known to be polluted. The farm's name was not revealed, but it is likely a breeding farm under the provincial government's purview that is subsidized and too important to be closed or moved.
In 2014--when officials were ramping up the campaign to close polluting pig farms--a mechanism was set up to allow this farm to pay the fish farm for its pollution. The damage to the fish farm is surely only a fraction of the full social cost of the pig farm's pollution. Individual fishermen and people who use the water for drinking or other activities like food manufacturing did not receive compensation.
Will regulation of pig manure lighten up now that China likely faces a shortage of pork and needs to rebuild pork production capacity?
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