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Officials who push GDP and toxic industry turn blind eye to pollution

By Wu Jiayin | May 1, 2009, Friday | Print Edition

YET another sick and polluted Chinese river - this time the Xiangjiang River in Hunan Province - is urgently in need of government intervention to clean it up.

If the government, which is considering the project, decides to go ahead, this would mean more policy measures and financial support for the endangered river, according to China Economic Weekly on Monday.

However, unless the country dramatically changes its priorities - and puts environmental protection ahead of economic growth - the Xiangjiang River's prospects are not bright.

According to the report, the Xiangjiang River is mainly polluted by toxic heavy metals from the rapid development of mineral resources-related industries in Hunan Province.

Big factories near the river discharge directly into the stream.

In recent years, the province's discharge of mercury, cadmium, chrome and lead has been the highest in China. Arsenic and sulfur dioxide discharges are also high.

The river is also a main drinking water source for Hunan Province, but it is so heavily tainted by deadly metals that drinking water safety for 40 million people is also an issue. Cases of heavy metal poisoning have been reported.

Large expanse of agricultural land has also been poisoned.

Indeed, local environmental protection departments are partly to blame, but the situation is too big for local jurisdictions to handle.

Take mineral-rich Linwu County and its many illegal exploration and processing facilities.

Lack of proper handling of wastes means that huge amounts of heavy metal pollute the waters in the area and these flow to the Xiangjiang River.

This forced the county's environmental protection chief, Chen Jianbo, to patrol the mining areas every day to crack down on illegal exploration.

But as soon as the patrols depart, the illegal mining and exploration teams return, said Chen.

The root of the problem, as Chen and many local officials point out, lies in the limited punishments that local enforcement agencies can apply.

For example, they cannot cut off power or water supply, nor revoke the business license of illegally operating enterprises.

Neither can they resort to freezing the assets of noncomplying enterprises.

Orders for the suspension of operations or the shutdown of enterprises and institutions should also be issued by the local people's government, rather than environmental protection departments.

According to the revised Law on Prevention and Control of Water Pollution, local environmental protection departments can only impose limited fines - just two to five times the standard pollution discharge fees the polluters regularly pay.

Fines are meaningless to profitable companies - it's more profitable for them to pollute and pay the fines than otherwise.

The largest known fine to date in Hunan Province is the 1 million yuan (US$146,413) fine to the Yuanjiang Papermaking Co. That's only about one-thousandth of the average annual company revenue, said to be around 1 billion yuan, according to China Economic Weekly.

All these restrictions make it impossible to effectively crack down on water pollution by enterprises that flout the law.

It must be noted that the Xiangjiang River's main source of pollution comes from the province's pillar industries - mining and processing minerals.

According to the news report, the 2005 gross industrial output value of the Xiangjiang River Basin accounted for about 81 percent the province's total gross industrial output value.

In 2008, as the gross domestic product of the province exceeded 1 trillion yuan for the first time, the gross output value of nonferrous metal industries of the province also surpassed 100 billion yuan.

Obviously, to the local government, limiting development of those industries means slower economic growth.

That's unacceptable to officials at a time when GDP growth is the major measure for evaluating the performance of officials. Higher GDP means higher pay, more perks and promotions.

Chinese Views


 

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