China Addresses Soil Pollution with Agriculture Reforms

As China’s pork industry continues to expand, the country will need to address a greater problem lying just beneath the surface—soil pollution.

According to a national soil survey from the Chinese government in 2014, 19.4% of the country’s farmland was polluted by chemical contaminants and metals such as lead, cadmium, and arsenic. Overall, 2% of China’s land is too polluted to even use for farming anymore. That’s around 11,800 square miles—roughly the size of the entire country of Belgium.

Increased industrialization across the country has led to an excessive amount of toxic materials building up in the soil over time. Mining, energy production, waste incineration, manufacturing processes, and even agricultural uses all contribute to soil pollution. Failure to address the problem early on means that some land is now completely unusable and unsalvageable.

To prevent the problem from worsening, China plans to treat waste from its livestock breeding programs to reduce agricultural pollution. The country also intends to implement tougher penalties for contributing to pollution, prohibit construction in areas with contaminated soil, and increase the use of animal waste as fertilizer instead of chemical fertilizers. As the world’s largest pork producer, accounting for roughly half of global production, pursuing these agriculture reforms is in the country’s best interests—should China fail to protect its farmland, it could prove to be a rocky future for its pork industry.