Heavy
Metal 12 Million Tons of Chinese Rice Contaminated
Time.com
Posted
by Krista Mahr
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 5:07 am
God’s
hand continues to rise against the Idol of China that has lifted itself above
all including God Himself. Realize that
the wheat examined here is from 2007 stocks, this now indicates that China will
have to import all the more foreign rice and wheat – exacerbating the shortages
we face in 2011 AND 2012. Add to this the tsunami
in Japan
destroying tens of thousands of acres of farm land to the already long list of
nations that have had crop failures from floods, pestilences, and fires driving
up prices all the more. Meaning more shortages, more riots and more governments falling to
Islam.
Hong Kong's English daily South China Morning Post has a distinctly unsavory
dispatch from the Chinese media this morning: Government scientists have
released research that millions of acres of Chinese agricultural land and over
12 million tons of Chinese grain are contaminated by toxic metal pollution, according to this week's edition of the China
Economic Weekly, a state-run magazine.
Last week, a
separate article reported that 10% of Chinese rice contained excess cadmium, a heavy metal known to cause cancer.
Beijing quickly
responded to last week's news by announcing it was
re-focusing its efforts to reign in heavy metal pollution over the weekend,
identifying 4500 operations across the nation, including chemical
manufacturers, battery manufacturers and mines, to be put under stricter controls.
Today's SCMP article says the farmland pollution is particularly bad in China's southwestern Yunnan,
Guangdong and
Guangxi provinces.
The polluting
effects of China's
rapid industrialization are hardly news. But the industrial
clusters cropping up in the nation's farm belts present new problems.
Food safety in China in the past few years has primarily been framed as a
problem of corruption in the supply chain, as was the case in the melamine
scandal, or the overuse of pesticides, insecticides and chemical fertilizers in
agriculture. Crop contamination by heavy metals from nearby industry that soak
into the soil did not start this year — in fact the rice samples used to determine the 10%
contamination rate were taken back in 2007 — but the scope of the problem is just
beginning to be fully comprehended.
The domestic health ramifications of this information
will take even longer to determine. China's has a growing list of what have come to be known as
“cancer villages” — towns next door
to badly regulated factories where myriad forms of pollution have caused high
cancer rates in residents. In January, to name one example, a battery factory
was forced to close after more than 200 children living in its vicinity were
diagnosed with high levels of lead in their blood in Anhui
province, just west of Shanghai.
(Read about how your jeans might be
contributing to China's
industrial health problems.)
So what happens when this kind of contamination is spread
to millions of Chinese consumers, albeit at lower levels? (China exports relatively little rice; the U.S., for instance, only imported about $4
million in rice from China
in 2010, compared to $13 million in soybeans.) Rice, China's staple food, turns out to be a particularly good conduit
for the metal cadmium, particularly hybrid rice varieties that are planted in
acidic soils, as is widely the case in southwest China. And cadmium is not the
kind of thing you want to be ingesting in vast quantities. OSHA describes it as an “extremely toxic
metal” with the following effects from acute and chronic exposure:
- Acute — Indicates that metal fume fever may result from acute exposure
with flu-like symptoms of weakness, fever, headache, chills, sweating and
muscular pain. Acute pulmonary edema usually develops within 24 hours and
reaches a maximum by three days. If death from asphyxia does not occur,
symptoms may resolve within a week.
- Chronic — Identifies the most serious consequence of chronic cadmium
poisoning is cancer (lung and prostate). The first observed chronic effect
is generally kidney damage, manifested by excretion of excessive (low
molecular weight) protein in the urine. Cadmium also is believed to cause
pulmonary emphysema and bone disease (osteomalcia
and osteoporosis). The latter has been observed in Japan
("itai-itai" disease) where residents
were exposed to cadmium in rice crops irrigated with cadmium-contaminated
water. Cadmium may also cause anemia, teeth discoloration (Cd forms CdS) and loss of
smell (anosmia).
The China Economic Weekly report estimates
economic losses from contaminated rice could be as much as $3 billion a year.
But that's making a big assumption — that the metal-laced rice gets pulled
out of the supply chain and counted as a loss. It's highly unlikely that
millions of tons of rice in China
are going to go through the kind of highly standardized testing this would
require. The long-term costs of dealing with large swaths of the Chinese
population that slowly ingest cadmium with potential effects ranging from
kidney damage to bone disease are, to put it lightly, harder to calculate.