China’s Organic Farming: Agriculture Goes Green
September 18th, 2009 Posted in Green Living & News
Organic farming is slowly becoming the thing to do is the U.S., and it’s starting to expand in China as well.
Spurred by its huge population, China has begun to clean up its farmlands to improve food quality and citizens’ health.
Until 2004, a common fertilizer for Chinese farms was sewage waste. In addition to natural excrement, hospital waste and factory runoff were also going into the sewer, contaminating the soil and crops.
China’s government set regulations for farming and pollution in an attempt to prevent another incident like the spoiled soya milk in 2004, which poisoned 78 school children.
The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture is charged with ensuring the standards are followed as well as distributing China’s “Green Food” label. However, the label only denotes a “low pesticide” use, as opposed to a true organic growing process. They have another label for genetically engineered food, something the U.S. doesn’t do.
Only 10 percent of the nation’s organically-certified land is used for grain. The rest of the space goes to teas and fruits.
China has two big problems to overcome in order to produce organic food on a large scale: land space and enforcement. Because of a mountainous countryside, only 15 percent of the land is arable and only a portion of that is certified for organic growth. China is known for its lax law enforcement, and having enough officials to cover all the farmland is a daunting task.
In an attempt to clean up their act, China has been working hard to clean up their farms by eliminating toxic fertilizer and pesticides. If they can continue to increase their production of organic food, they will soon be able to compete with American farmers.
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By Tiff Ting on Sep 21, 2009
I’m a bit skeptical of China’s ability to clean up their act in a timeframe that will actually make an impact, but when they do, it’ll certainly be exciting since the country supports a significant population. China will need to overcome the lax government enforcement it faces by cracking down much harder on corruption and educating its youth with a healthy dose of integrity.