The Shanghaiist
Last year China Daily reported on a farmer in Yunnan who admitted that he would never dare to eat the vegetables he sells, due to the amounts of chemicals pesticides and fertilizers used on them. Instead he grows a separate chemical-free patch of vegetables for personal consumption. A practice that is unlikely to be restricted to this farmer alone.
Just in the last year Greenpeace has exposed several pesticide scandals: we found banned, toxic pesticides in tea (including Lipton) and banned pesticides on vegetables being sold in several major supermarket chains, or at levels that are illegal (including Tesco). It’s sadly not so surprising considering we’re living in a country whose pesticide use is, per unit area, 2.5 times the global average.
But there is something you can do about it: eat organic.
Not only is it better for your health, but you’ll be supporting a far more environmentally friendly mode of farming. (Think about it – poisoning pests also means poisoned soil and poisoned water.) The more people in China who eat organic, the more we’ll see a shift away from chemically-intensive farming and an improvement in the country’s soil and water quality.
What is organic food?
Production of organic food doesn’t allow for the use of synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, growth regulators, feed additives and genetically engineered organisms. Organic food producers often use sustainable farming practices that protects bio-diversity, such as crop rotation and conservation methods.
How can I tell if food is organic or not?
Look out for these certified organic stamps:
These stamps means the food has been certified by one of the 23 organic food certification groups in China. While these are independent institutions, they’ve all been accredited by the Chinese government’s Certification and Accreditation Administration. In order to qualify organic producers have to produce a range of records and have a traceability system in place in order to ensure their goods sit in accordance with national standards for organic products. Certification bodies are expected to conduct tracking and surveillance of these goods, with certification inspectors carrying out spot checks.
Yeah, but is it really organic?
Well, like anything in China, supervision and control systems can be lax, and cheats and frauds (like Wal-Mart) occasionally manage to find a way of getting their goods onto market. That said, organic food products are still far more likely to be better than non-organic (in terms of having none or lower amounts of synthetic pesticides, fertilizers and hormones).
What else can I do to avoid pesticide consumption?
Besides eating organic, buy fruits and vegetables that are in season – they are less likely to have needed chemical enhancements. Here’s an article that highlights Chinese fruits and veggies by season (and their health benefits according to Traditional Chinese Medicine.) Remember, when you see a ginormous, bright red tomato – out of season – there’s a good chance it’s been pumped full of chemicals.
You can also peel your food, although this isn’t a foolproof method.
You can also go shopping at supermarkets which have decent traceability systems and pesticide control systems. Greenpeace’s supermarket ranking guide will come in handy, with our 2011 edition listing Carrefour, Auchan and Shanghai City as the best options for Shanghai shoppers.
Where can I buy organic food?
Besides big supermarkets like Carrefour, blog Slow Food Shanghai has listed four organic food producers that deliver to your door. You can visit these farms (in fact, most of them encourage you to!) and some require membership. Remember, buying organic means accepting that sometimes certain foods won’t be in season, or subject to weather conditions. On the upside, it means you’ll have a real and direct relationship with the people making the food you eat.
Biofarm
http://www.biofarm.cn/en/index2.html
Ph: 400 620 0789
Yi Mu Tian
http://www.1mutian.com/Engymt/Index.html
Ph: 021 3453 7900
Tony’s Farm
http://www.tonysfarm.com/en/index.aspx
Ph: 400 820 2162
Mahota Biodynamic farm
http://www.mahotafarm.com/index.php/en/
Ph: 021 6944 1040
You can also try Fields, a (very expat-friendly) website that among its offerings includes organic food, and can be delivered to your door. The company claims to have direct relationships with a number of reliable local organic food suppliers across the country.
Also head to Slow Food Shanghai’s events section to find out about upcoming farmer markets and tours of organic farms.
If you want to head out to an organic food restaurant in Shanghai you can try:
Organic Kitchen Shanghai
http://www.organickitchenshanghai.com/
Ph: 021 6288 3312
Qimin Organic Hot Pot
http://www.qi-min.com/
Ph: 021 6258 8777
Ming Tang Organic Dining Wine & Bar
http://www.mingtang.com/
Ph: 021 6152 6668
The Shanghaiist, May 2012.
Image (cc) foxxyz
The Diplomat
The tea fields of coastal Chinese province Zhejiang cover the hills in rows of lush, green tea bushes. The image is reminiscent of the rolling vineyards of Tuscany. And in many ways, tea is to China what wine is to the West. Pu’er tea ages just like a bottle of red, with raw Pu’er from the 1950-70s commanding as much as $20,000 a pound. And whether it’s high-end “luxury” teas being exchanged through the hands of China’s elite or ordinary household brands being brewed in just about every household of China, tea is an essential part of Chinese culture.
But is this tea safe to drink? A recent report from Greenpeace has uncovered the presence of illegal pesticides in some of China’s most popular teas such as Methomyl and Endosulfan, the latter of which has been banned globally under the Stockholm Convention due to its toxic properties.
In December 2011 and January 2012, Greenpeace took samples from nine well-known tea companies in China. Eighteen different kinds of medium-grade tea were purchased at random, and sent to an accredited third-party laboratory for pesticide testing. Twelve of the 18 samples contained at least one pesticide banned for use on tea. Every single sample contained at least three different kinds of pesticides, and on the sample Richun’s Tieguanyin 803 tea a total of 17 different kinds of pesticides was found.
One of these 17 kinds of pesticides was Endosulfan, a chemical that the U.N. Stockholm Convention in 2010 called “highly toxic to humans,” with a global ban negotiated last year. The pesticide has also been identified by the U.S. EPA as a potential endocrine disruptor, while other studies suggest effects on male reproductive development.
China is the world’s biggest producer of tea, and also the world’s largest pesticide producer and consumer. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, in 2009, the country’s total output of pesticides reached 2.26 million tons. In recognition of this problem, China’s Ministry of Agriculture last year announced its goal of reducing nationwide pesticide use in 2015 by 20 percent.
This massive pesticide use isn’t just putting the health of consumers at risk; it also threatens the health of the tea planters and tea processers who come into direct contact with the chemicals. A study last year conducted on 910 pesticide applicators from two villages in southern China found that more than 8 percent suffered pesticide poisoning. This followed a 2006 WHO workshop in Beijing that also looked at how pesticide poisoning was the most common method of suicide in China, mainly due to the ready availability and accessibility of highly toxic pesticides that are otherwise banned in many developed countries. Moreover, the workshop noted that an additional 17,000 annual deaths are estimated to occur from unintentional exposure to pesticides (both ingestion and occupational exposure).
There are several reasons why China’s pesticide use has reached such epic levels.
One major factor has been a response to the negative impact of climate change. Rising temperatures has helped many pests and pathogens survive the usually cold, winter months, and farmers have reacted by bumping up their pesticide application. These farmers have little in the way of training, support or knowledge of the best way to deal with these changing conditions, so their attitude has become one of “spray, baby spray.”
The problem, of course, is that in the long term, applying vast amounts of pesticides may do more harm than good. “In the quick pursuit of a high yield many Chinese farmers consider pesticides as the most effective, even the only way, to cope with pest and disease. But in spraying more pesticides or using more fertilizers you upset the natural balance of the soil which can lead to more disease,” says Food and Agriculture campaigner at Greenpeace, Wang Jing.
Good quality soil and clean water are the foundations of China’s famed tea products, and yet these basic components are being quickly compromised. Greenpeace is therefore calling on companies to switch to eco-agriculture, which make use of methods such as intercropping, light traps, and integrated pest management. Despite the vital importance to the country’s future, the Chinese government’s funding for research and development of eco-agriculture is currently dwarfed thirty times by that for genetically engineered food. This is particularly risky at a time when GE is proving impotent to the rapidly changing climate-affected landscape.
Replying to the grave challenges of drastic climate change, and doing so in a way that is sustainable, will only be achieved with a combination of modern knowledge and techniques, along with a revival of the time-tested farming techniques that were once a mainstay in China’s long history of eco-agriculture, extending back for thousands of years.
And even if the debate around pesticide use is put aside, the fact remains that this recent report proves that there is a large-scale use of illegal pesticides in the local tea growing industry. Seven of the tested firms sit within China’s top 10 tea sellers and are brands that are either turning a blind eye or being complicit with their suppliers’ illegal conduct. As with many things in China – be it the release of toxic chemicals by manufacturing companies or big brands breaking the law in regards to working conditions – it’s the lack of an effective traceability and supply chain control system that time and time again sees laws being broken.
As this story of China’s compromised quality control in their tea begins to spread around the world it remains to be seen whether it will have an impact of tea exports, one of the country’s most important export commodities. In 2010, the country exported 302,400 tons of tea valued at $784 million.
“That more than half of China’s top 10 tea sellers are selling tea tainted with banned pesticides is a huge embarrassment for China’s tea industry,” Wang Jing says. “It shows a totally lack of responsibility from the tea sellers, who have failed to exercise any control over pesticide usage.”
The Diplomat, April 2012.
Image © Greenpeace
The Diplomat
Early one morning in 2011, environmentalist Lei Yuting was crouched by the side of the Fenghua River, which snakes through the Chinese province of Ningbo. Despite his face mask and protective goggles he could smell the chemical dyes that polluted the water. His gear drew the attention of a few locals passing by on their morning exercise. They stopped to tell him that the area always smells bad, and that the color of the wastewater changes throughout the day.
Moments later they hurried off. Lei says he got the feeling few chose to linger by a river that a few decades ago would have been clear and teeming with fisherman, tourists and local children. Now, nothing broke the lifelessness except the occasional freight-carrying barge and a couple of lonely white egrets, perched on the muddy banks. There were certainly no more fishing boats.
Lei is a campaigner with Greenpeace, and was in the area collecting water samples for an investigation that would eventually reveal how two textile manufacturers, supplying some of the world’s biggest fashion brands, are discharging hazardous substances such as nonylphenol (NP) into Chinese waterways. NP is a chemical with hormone-disrupting properties that’s persistent (i.e. doesn’t readily break down in the environment), moderately bioaccumulative (it builds up in the food chain), and hazardous to aquatic life even at very low levels.
The use of NP in clothing manufacturing has effectively been banned within the EU, with similar restrictions also in place in the United States and Canada. Of course, this is hardly the first time multinational companies have taken advantage of lax standards in other countries. Exporting the manufacturing industry hasn’t been accompanied by the export of high environmental protection standards, and has led to a host of pollution problems in China, most pressingly water pollution. Ask any local, it seems, and it’s hard to find a river clean enough to swim in in this country.
“These are supposed to be some of the most scenic mountains and clearest waters in China. How is it that they are now poisoned by industry and filled with sorrow?” Lei asks.
Consumers often find it easy to turn a blind eye to the conditions in which their clothes were manufactured, but when a good produced using hazardous chemicals means those items themselves contain hazardous chemicals, then it unsurprisingly becomes a little harder to ignore.
In the latest toxics report to be commissioned by Greenpeace, simulations of standard domestic laundering on 14 clothing samples found that a single wash can wash out a substantial amount of the nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPE) residues present within textile products. More than 80 percent were washed out for half of the plain fabric samples tested. This suggests that all residues of NPEs within textile products will be washed out over their lifetime, and that in many cases this will have occurred after just the first few washes.
These NPEs are then discharged to wastewater treatment plants, which don’t effectively treat or prevent the release of these hazardous substances into the environment. Indeed, they can break down NPEs to form toxic and hormone-disrupting NPs that are then released within the treated water.
In short, brands are making their consumers unsuspecting accomplices in the release of these hazardous substances into public water supplies. And, let’s not forget, we’re talking about a substance that has been effectively banned or heavily restricted in the EU, United States and Canada.
NPEs are a compound belonging to a broader group of chemicals known as alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEs). It’s not enough to set a lower limit for the concentration of APEs in finished products (although we need this as well.) Suppliers could attempt to give the final product additional rinsing, which may help reduce the chemical levels in the product. But this would still be discharged into the rivers, lakes and seas of the manufacturing countries. That’s why the chemicals should be eliminated from the process entirely.
Greenpeace has already convinced six major brands – Puma, Nike, Adidas, Li-Ning, H&M and C&A – to collaborate on a “draft joint roadmap towards zero discharge of hazardous chemicals.” This roadmap sets out the steps that the brands commit to take to achieve the zero discharge of hazardous chemicals, and invites others to partner in this endeavor. However, the roadmap doesn’t yet include a specific commitment or a date to eliminate all uses of APEs.
In Europe, restrictions on the marketing of products with NPEs above a specified level are under development. Equally important is that measures are taken to restrict the use of APEs in manufacture for the countries where the majority of manufacturing takes place, such as in East Asia and Southeast Asia.
As global citizens, it’s surely time to start applying some pressure.
The Diplomat, April 2012.
Image © Lu Guang / Greenpeace
The Diplomat
China’s State Council has released a ground-breaking draft proposal of a grain law that establishes legislation restricting research, field trials, production, sale, import and export of genetically engineered grain seeds. The draft stipulates that no organization or person can employ unauthorized GE technology in any major food product in China.
“This is actually a world-first initiative that deals with GE food legislation at state law level,” according to my colleague, Fang Lifeng, a food and agriculture campaigner with Greenpeace.
“There are currently too many loopholes and weak control over GE food and technology in China. This law needs to clarify what ‘relevant laws and regulations’ can be applied to regulate GE crops. We urge legislators to accelerate the legislation of Genetically Engineered Organisms Bio-safety Law, and also to enhance the supervision of GE food and other products. Otherwise, this law will only be paying lip service,” Fang warned.
The grain law will likely have significant ramifications for China’s rice, the country’s most important staple food. The origins of rice cultivation can be traced to the valleys of the Yangtze River, with some estimates suggesting cultivation began over 7,000 years ago. It dictates the lives of millions of farmers in the Chinese countryside and feeds over a billion Chinese citizens each year. And using experimental GE technology to meddle with such a widely eaten crop could spell disaster – ecologically, financially and for human health.
This latest announcement comes after a highly successful and complex seven year campaign by activists to keep GE rice out of the country’s food market.
In 2004, Greenpeace activists were in Yunnan, visiting farmers who employed traditional Chinese farming methods such as when they got wind that Chinese scientists had applied to commercialize four varieties of Chinese GE rice. While the announcement didn’t mean any immediate commercialization of GE rice – the rice would still have to pass many more stages of approval – it was a major step towards commercialization. “I was totally shocked,” said Sze Pang Cheung, now Campaign Director of Greenpeace.
Cheung and his team set about unraveling the complex web of players involved in the push to commercialize. “For a scientist to have a high level of credibility they need to be separated from approval bodies and industry,” Cheung says. “But in China, GE scientists are such a close knit gang that the people sitting on approval boards for research money, biosafety boards that approve product safety, the scientists at public research institutes, and those at biotech companies who plan to produce and profit from GE rice are either one and the same, or closely connected.”
Cheung says he also sent a team undercover to Wuhan, Hubei’s provincial capital, where they had heard rumors that GE rice was already being illegally farmed. The activists would ask around for any new strains of pest-resistant rice, buy a few bags of these, and test the samples back in their hotel rooms. The quick-testers came up positive. Farmers in the region were already unwittingly buying and growing these seeds, which meant GE rice was already being sold in China – completely illegally.
China is a country where money talks, nationalism is rampant and people take their food seriously. And it would be multi-national companies – not Chinese farmers – who would stand to profit from GE rice from technology and patents. Never before had a country’s staple food gone GE. Monsanto had tried and failed to commercialize GE wheat in Canada, and there were fears they were hoping China would become the first guinea pig, opening the gate to genetic experiments with staple crops.
All of these concerns – the tangled web of scientists with conflicting interests, the government’s proven inability to control GE from “infecting” the market, and the viable threat of national food security – were getting airplay in the Chinese media. Despite this, and the concerns of the public, by the end of 2009 it was looking all but inevitable that China’s rice would go GE. The government, long after the fact, announced that a secret multi-ministerial meeting had passed two GE rice lines even though they had not received biosafety certificates at the time.
With no time to lose, the campaign team stepped up its anti-GE message and received help from the most unlikely of sources: Chinese state magazine Outlook Weekly published a front-page GE-rice debate issue. Then Chinese politicians began raising GE doubts, followed by a string of Chinese celebrities including Mao Zedong’s daughter and the father of China’s hybrid rice, Yuan Longping. Several Chinese scholars signed a petition urging caution on GE rice and submitted it to the annual parliament meeting.
A media storm soon broke out: TV, magazines, newspapers, online media were all joining the debate. Greenpeace also exposed Wal-Mart for allegedly selling GE rice and filed a legal case against them. The team beamed a GE shopper’s guide to half a million Chinese consumers through mobile and Internet services. Chinese consumers joined the campaign, ringing up companies and demanding they go non-GE. Two huge corporations, Cofco and Yihai Kerry, made non-GE pledges and a string of supermarkets also pledged not to use GE ingredients in their own brands and with their fresh unpacked fruits, vegetables and grains.
The tide towards GE rice had made a remarkable reversal. In September 2011, China’s major financial weekly, the Economic Observer, quoted an information source close to the Agriculture Ministry saying that for the next 5 to 10 years, China had suspended the commercialization of GE rice. This latest announcement puts further restrictions on the growth of GE rice in the nation.
“China’s money must be spent on supporting food that is safe for human consumption and the production of which has taken into account environmental impacts,” Fang says. “And GE technology has clearly failed to do either.”
The Diplomat, February 2012.
Image © Greenpeace
The Diplomat
The week leading up to Chinese New Year is a period during which many Chinese are focused on their preparations to return home for the holidays. But unbeknownst to the citizens of the Southern Chinese city of Hechi, industrial waste discharge, containing high levels of cadmium, was also leeching into a 100-kilometer stretch of the Longjiang and Liujiang rivers in Guangxi Province.
Although cadmium contamination was reportedly detected in Hechi as early as January 15, the only specific information made public by Hechi officials was an official media release on January 19. The lack of concrete, reliable and very importantly detailed information impeded disaster relief efforts by city officials further down the river and also led to a panic induced rush by concerned citizens who packed out supermarkets in order to buy bottled water.
The reaction from local officials in downstream Liuzhou was considerably better: on January 23 they began releasing data on cadmium levels in the Liujiang River almost on an hourly basis, disseminating this information using social media. But the fact remains that at the pollution source, an inadequate system of monitoring and inspection of local industry impeded the ability to identify who the actual source of the pollution was.
“Knowledge is power,” and in this case, as with many environmental concerns in China, to have knowledge we first need data.
In 2010, Greenpeace began to suspect that factories along the Yangtze River and Pearl River Delta were releasing hazardous chemicals into China’s waterways. A team of investigators, including toxics campaigner Zhang Kai, were sent in to unearth the extent of the pollution and the culprits at hand. “Our investigators had to work undercover and conceal their identity. For example we had some workers pretend to apply for work at the factory so they could take photos of the plant secretly, and others gathered information by just chatting to factory workers,” Zhang Kai says.
Time and time again, the lack of data proved to be the biggest hurdle when it came to pinpointing the true state of China’s pollution.
“The most challenging parts were the investigations into the production process and the supply chain. This included investigating the effluent from the suppliers’ sewage pipes and the precise relationship between the brands and the suppliers. In Mainland China, factories don’t clearly mark their effluent pipes, so we needed to confirm which pipe belonged to which factory and then we needed to make at least five sampling trips for each factory pipe.”
“This was one of Greenpeace’s most complex investigations because the relationship between textile plants and the big brands was often opaque and it was vital that we established the relationship clearly.”
Previously, Greenpeace East Asia published a feature titled “Ten dirty tricks that factories play in China” that reveals just how sophisticated polluters are at concealing how much and how toxic their effluent is.
Despite the complexity of the investigation, Greenpeace were able to come to an extensive set of concrete conclusions that would eventually comprise two reports: “Dirty Laundry: Unraveling the corporate connections to toxic water pollution in China,” and “Dirty Laundry 2: Unraveling the toxic trail from pipes to products.”
Only then could a global campaign be rolled out involving thousands of concerned citizens and Greenpeace activists, both Chinese and overseas. The campaign would put pressure on some of the world’s biggest retail brands to phase out all hazardous chemicals by 2020. The brands that eventually came on board included heavyweights like Adidas, Puma, Nike, H&M and China’s own Li-Ning. Labels with another market share and pull to transform an entire textiles industry.
Head of toxics at Greenpeace East Asia, Ma Tianjie, is adamant that China’s public has an important role to play in improving environmental standards in their country. And key to this is information disclosure. An inventory of basic information covering who is discharging what, and by how much, will allow government and non-government agencies to trace the pollution back to polluters as well as public pressure on companies and their supply chain to improve their performance.
Ma Tianjie gives an example of the positive impacts stemming from transparency in China: “In August 2011, the ministry made an unprecedented move by releasing detailed pollution information on more than 1,900 lead-acid battery facilities across the country. It was the first time that information on an entire industry’s environmental performance was made public.”
“Reactions to the initiative were overwhelmingly positive. A close scrutiny of the data by the media, environmental NGOs and the public resulted in corrections and a dataset of improved quality, which would only help the ministry to better supervise the listed facilities,” Ma added. “Updated data were released again to the public in November. But no panic followed. Instead, what we got were improved data and an empowered public.”
The Diplomat, February 2012.
Image © Lu Guang / Greenpeace
