China: Food Crops Grown in Soil Polluted with Heavy Metals
July 3rd, 2007Devastation.
Via: Wall Street Journal / Moneyweb:
For nearly two decades, Lai Mandai regularly ate and sold beans, cabbage and watermelons grown on a plot of land a short walk from a lead smelting plant in her village.
Like dozens of other villagers who ate locally grown food, Ms. Lai, 39 years old, developed health problems. “When I did work, planting vegetables or cleaning the floor, I felt so tired, and my fingers felt numb,” Ms. Lai says. “I talked with other villagers. They had the same problems.”
Ms. Lai, along with 57 other villagers, was eventually diagnosed with high levels of cadmium, a heavy metal that can cause kidney disease and softening of the bones. Runoff from the factory — which the government tore down in 2004 — had contaminated the farmland and entered the food supply. A Chinese government report found that rice grown in the village contained 20 times the permitted level of cadmium.
China’s tainted food supply has fallen under heightened scrutiny after a shipment of wheat flour contaminated with a chemical used in fire retardants found its way into pet food and was linked to the deaths of U.S. animals in late March. Concerns have since soared over the safety of the country’s exports. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently told consumers to stop buying toothpaste made in China because it might contain poisonous diethylene glycol. Last week, the FDA sounded an alarm on farm-raised seafood from China, citing excessive levels of antibiotics and additives.
Yet after decades of industrial pollution, some of the worst contaminants making their way into the country’s food come from the soil in which it is grown. So far it hasn’t been determined the extent to which tainted crops such as rice, fruits and vegetables have been exported to the U.S. What is clear is that in contaminated areas dotting the country, residents have been eating such food for years or decades.
Pingyang, where Ms. Lai lives, is among the so-called hot spots in China where farmland lying in the shadow of factory smokestacks or mining operations has been contaminated by heavy metals. These elements can cause a sweeping range of health problems, from brain damage to cancer.
Chinese academics have written about such sites in more than a dozen studies over the past two years in Chinese and international scientific journals. In a study published earlier this year, researchers at the Guangdong Institute of Ecology found excessive levels of cadmium and mercury in Chinese cabbage grown in Foshan, a major manufacturing center in southern China. Last year, researchers at Lanzhou University published research showing that vegetables at four sites near the mining and smelting city of Baiyin in the Northwestern Gansu province contained hazardous levels of cadmium, lead and copper. A study of crops grown in the central city of Chongqing found excessive lead and cadmium levels in vegetables at 20 sites.
