#1 More precisely, the article says that farm fertilizer and pesticide use cause more water pollution than industry, and they get to that conclusion by apparently limiting it to organic pollution, not heavy metals and the like. Which is true, and probably is even true in the US. Agriculture has a heavy and wide footprint by its very nature.
The Chinese probably have a severe problem with inefficient resource usage; it takes a good deal of science to properly schedule and meter chemical fertilizer and pesticide applications. Soil testing is expensive and time-consuming; so are VRA rigs and the data-processing & prescription map generating necessary to exploit soil testing properly (business plug! this is what my division specializes in, it pays my salary!). If you're not being careful, a lot of the (very expensive and polluting!) chemical fertilizer you've dumped onto your fields are going to end up downstream from you, killing off the aquatic ecosystem instead of feeding your crops.
Up to about thirty years ago, the Chinese didn't use chemical fertilizers at all - it was mostly manure, and heavily human waste manure at that. It took the death of that maniac Mao to free up the ChiComs to even think about chemical fertilizers, they can't possibly have all that much human capital in terms of extension offices, soil labs, and experienced commercial farmers, no matter how much equipment and raw materials they might have been able to buy. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they're making a mess of it. |