Dim Sums: Agricultural Markets in China

China's new strategy is for giant pig farms to sell carbon credits to finance their waste treatment facilities. Western environmental groups have questioned whether a surge of Chinese pig farms offering to sell carbon credits to foreign buyers really needed the credits to build biogas facilities, so China has created its own carbon-trading mechanism for pig farms with relaxed standards. Since the Chinese carbon market is only for large scale CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), Chinese news media are assuring the public that industrialized farms are "green" too. A pig farm operated by Muyuan Foods. The dark rectangle in the back is the manure collection lagoon. Source: Xinhua News Agency. In December 2025 China's Ministries of Environment and Agriculture jointly issued a methodology for China's Certified Voluntary Emission Reduction (CCER) covering utilization of biogas from livestock manure at large-scale pig farms . According to the document large-sca...

Heavy metal-contaminated rice has been turning up in China's market for decades. Officials blame bad actors rather than the system that shovels loans to trusted government-run companies with no market discipline, little oversight, and with protection from nosy journalists--except when it suits authorities' interests to unleash the reporters.  This month a husband-wife team was found guilty of selling "poison rice" by a court in the Guangdong Province city of Yangjiang. The couple named Zhu and Yan was sentenced to 15 and 10 years in prison, respectively, and ordered to pay 87 million yuan in penalties. According to news media , over the course of 8 months in 2019 Zhu and Yan purchased 5,884 metric tons of rice with excessive levels of cadmium from a granary in Hunan Province operated by the national grain reserve. Their contract specified that the rice had to be used as animal feed and could not enter the market for human food, but Zhu and Yan were accused of knowingl...

Celebrating the results of China's second pollution census in early June, an agricultural official bragged that the agricultural sector produced more grain and meat while simultaneously reducing its discharge of pollution, a sign of progress in the greening of the country's farms, so he said. An environmental official also lauded the progress, but acknowledged that "green agricultural development" is still in its infancy. Data showing a boom in fertilizer application during the years when runoff supposedly fell 55 percent cast doubt on the pollution census data. A communique announcing results of China's second pollution census was issued June 8, 2020. The census estimated discharges of pollutants of water, air, and soil as of December 2017, ten years after the first pollution census revealed that agriculture was a major source of pollution. A 2014 survey of soil found that 19 percent of cultivated land was contaminated with heavy metals and other pollutan...

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 cour...

China's 5-year program to clean up rivers by closing pig farms is reaching further into the hinterland where there has been resistance from farmers and tepid support from local officials. Starting in 2013, Chinese officials issued a series of edicts ordering local officials to designate zones where pig farms would be banned, limited, or encouraged, based on potential to pollute rivers, concentration of residential housing, and scenic spots. Environmental officials have reported closing or moving over 100,000 farms, but there have evidently been pockets of resistance. Polluted canal in Yulin, Guangxi Province shown to demonstrate persisting poll Officials appear to be making an example of Yulin, a city in Guangxi Province midway between the provincial capital Nanning and Guangzhou. On June 4, the central government's Ministry of Environmental Protection admonished Yulin officials for failing to carry out directives to ban livestock and poultry farms in zones near the Nan...

An online commentator complained that China's pig farmers are dangerously irresponsible when it comes to pollution issues. The commentator visited a relative in the countryside who started raising pigs a couple years ago. With prices at record-high levels last year, the relative was pleased that he had earned a lot of money. During his visit, the commentator noticed there were many pig farms, and quite a few dumped manure into the small river that runs through the village. Knowing that China has been enforcing regulations to protect the environment by banning or limiting pigs in designated districts, the commentator asked his relative if he was under pressure. "What pressure?" the puzzled pig farmer replied. The city relative clarified: "Pressure from environmental protection?" The pig-farmer scoffed at the question. "Environmental protection has nothing to do with me. None of the villages around here are in districts that ban pig-farming,"...

China's President highlighted the importance of cleaning up and recycling agricultural waste in his plan to achieve a "well-off society" by 2020. President Xi Jinping made the comments in his capacity as chairman of the central financial leadership group meeting on December 21, 2016. The Ministry of Agriculture's project to increase the rate of treatment and recycling of livestock and poultry waste in selected pilot counties was one of 165 major projects endorsed at the meeting. The main objective is to use waste to make biogas and natural gas as a source of rural energy and utilize the residual as organic fertilizer. According to the August document announcing the Ministry of Agriculture's rural waste treatment pilot : China annually produces 3.8 billion metric tons (mmt) of livestock and poultry waste,  60 million carcasses of dead and diseased animals and poultry are produced annually, of which only a small proportion are disposed of properly 900 mmt o...

A Chinese rice expert suggested planting new "super rice" to suck heavy metals out of polluted soil. He recommended that the toxic rice be used to produce fuel ethanol. The recommendation was made at a fuel ethanol conference held in Guangdong Province. An aid to China's octogenarian superstar rice-breeding Yuan Longping gave the speech--Yuan was unable to be present due to "an important meeting." The "super rice" varieties tend to absorb large amounts of heavy metals from the soil. Yuan's aid suggested that planting these super rice varieties could be a cost-saving measure to rehabilitate the soil by sucking cadmium and other toxins out of polluted soil. It is estimated that one-fifth of China's cultivated land--including 25 districts of 11 provinces--and 12 million metric tons of grain produced in China are contaminated with heavy metals. Since the rice would be toxic, it was recommended that biofuel companies make it into fuel ethanol,...

Since 2013, officials have been demolishing pig farms all over the country. An article asks, " Pig Farm Demolition: Industry's Rebirth or Destruction ?" The demolitions are motivated by concerns about poor environmental controls and the prevalence of "problem pork" which has consumers "trembling with fear" over food safety. The embarrassment of the dead pigs floating in Shanghai's Huangpu River in March 2013 spurred the demolition campaign. The government had been encouraging pig-farming in recent years. There are many new large-scale farms, yet many small, scattered, dirty farms are popping up, especially in rural areas. Farmers complain that they will have nothing to do after their farm is demolished. But the article suggests that the demolitions may help save the industry by removing polluters to upgrade quality and confidence in the industry.  China seems to have started to turn the corner from its growth at all costs strategy.

Chinese officialdom is finally acknowledging soil contamination problems.  China's first soil contamination survey was released this week , revealing that 16 percent of all land monitored over eight years was polluted above accepted tolerances. The survey found that 19 percent of farmland of polluted. Results of China's 2005-13 soil contamination survey: Proportion of soil survey points with contamination above maximum tolerance 16.1% Of which:   Above tolerance limit but less than double 11.2%   Double-to-triple the tolerance 2.3%   Three-to-four times the tolerance 1.5%   Five times the tolerance 1.1% Source: Communique on soil contamination survey. The new-found environmental consciousness is apparently spurred by widespread concern about "cadmium rice" contamination that was publicized in 2013. In December, agricultural officials began to talk about pollution and environmental problems that make China's current level of produ...

Would you like your flour leaded or unleaded? Would you like a tumor with that rice? China's soil and water are heavily polluted with heavy metals that are absorbed into grain and vegetables. Chinese officials' insistence that its people eat grains grown in the country may expose them to a heightened risk of tumors and birth defects from ingesting pollutants contained in grains and vegetables. The dimsums blog has posted reports on heavy metal contamination , " dead soil ," " cadmium rice ," the secret soil survey , and the Ministry of Agriculture's  admission that agricultural pollution is "relatively serious ." Today dimsums summarizes " Crisis and Response in the Food Chain ," a well-documented article posted on a web site of the Development Research Center, a think tank that advises China's State Council on economic and social issues. The article cites a "harsh reality" of contemporary China: a high incidence ...

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported on China's serious soil pollution problems and the government's refusal to release the results of a national soil survey six years after it was begun and two years after it was completed. In December 2012, Southern Weekend published a report  of its extensive investigation of the soil survey. The details of the soil survey reveal that Chinese officialdom, for all its talk about a "scientific outlook on development," clings to Chinese government tradition of reporting only statistics that show its policies in a good light and hiding any results that are embarrassing. Furthermore, the slapdash approach to implementing gigantic programs, infighting and chaotic organization make it virtually impossible to produce reliable statistics in China. For decades, officials have been cognizant of problems with soil contamination and potential for vegetables and rice to absorb the pollutants. The 2006 official Chinese government ann...

Liu Xiangji, a rice mill operator in Hunan Province's You County, claims he hasn't been able to sleep at night since cadmium was detected in his mill's rice. "What is cadmium? I really don't know." Liu is perplexed because his mill removes husks, polishes the rice and bags it; nothing is added to the rice in the process. So he doesn't understand how rice could have become contaminated. In contrast to many of China's other food safety incidents, there is no "black-hearted" behavior or clear culprits intentionally adding poisons in the "cadmium rice" incident. Instead, it stems from widespread pollution of the rice-growing environment due to both unchecked industrialization and abuse of agricultural chemicals by farmers. The cadmium contamination is blamed largely on waste from mining and metal-smelting industries that is carried to fields by irrigation water, deposited in the soil and then absorbed by crops. Polluting industries ...

This blog has reported on water quality problems created by pig farms in China. In 2010, the Ministry of Environmental Protection called attention to livestock pollution and Shandong Province issued regulations restricting hog farms. Pollution from livestock has gotten more attention recently and its control was included in the 2011-15 five-year plan. Over the past year, the communist party has quietly been mobilizing local authorities to close down pig farms to address water pollution concerns. In Guangdong Province communist party authorities have been carrying out a remediation campaign to close "scattered, small, and chaotic" pig farms. Party officials are being mobilized to participate, propaganda about pig farms is being disseminated, and pig farmers are required to sign clean-up agreements. Last October, a village in Guangdong's Yongning Management District closed down a collective hog farm that was sited on the edge of a reservoir. The village communist p...

Shanghai and Jiaxing Prefecture officials have been jointly trying to use information on dead pigs' ear tags to trace floating pigs back to their original owners. The vice mayor of Jiaxing says that 8 have been traced to their farmers who have been slapped with penalties of 3,000 yuan ($475). Reporters have been snooping around Jiaxing and finding out about where dead pigs came from . In 2010 Jiaxing authorities built pig-disposal pits in every village. These are large cement tanks that break down pig carcasses using anaerobic fermentation. Each one holds about 40 metric tons of pig carcasses. Pigs are heavy and it's troublesome to transport them to a disposal site. Farmers had to pay someone 80 yuan ($13) to haul a dead pig away, so it was cheaper and easier to put the pigs in a bag and dump them on a creek bank or by the side of a road late at night. One person said that if you drive on the expressway from Hangzhou to Shanghai with your car windows down you can smell the...