December 12, 2007

 

Industrialisation driving out pig farms in China's Pearl River Delta

 

 

The recent ban on pig farming by Dongguan City in China's Guangdong province is not the first and would not be the last time a Chinese city in the Pearl River Delta region announce curbs on the agriculture industry.

 

Pig farms and other agricultural production are vanishing from the Greater Pearl River delta, one of China's prosperous regions.  The region, marked by Guangdong Province's nine prefectures (which include Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Dongguan), Hong Kong and Macau is a thriving territory boasting a population of 86.8 million with a GDP of US$328 billion in 2003.

 

The rising wealth of the region meant that authorities are now more open to industrial factories than pig farms and other livestock holdings, according to Chengdu Business News.

 

Dongguan City recently announced it is banning pig farming by 2009, citing the fact that one pig releases more effluents than 7-10 residents. The densely packed city would not be able to afford such a major pollutant authorities told the paper.

 

Efforts to clamp down on agricultural production in the city began as early as 2005, when authorities launched campaigns to reduce the area occupied by fish ponds and pig farms, the newspaper reported.

 

The ban this time round would finish off what previous campaigns have started, the newspaper reported..

 

Increasingly, fish ponds have been drained to make place for factories while pig farms are sited cheek by jowl with industrial plants and more of the latter are coming up. 

 

Authorities have claimed that although the city only has 750,000 pigs, the pollution generated by the farms housing them is equivalent to the waste by a population of 4.5 million people. The chemical effluents released by the farms amount to 18,000 tonnes a year, one reason why the city has decided to ban pig farming.

 

The rising pollutant levels churned out by pig farms runs counter to the city's aim of reducing the release of chemical pollutants from 108,000 tonnes a year in 2006 to 85,000 tonnes by 2010. 

 

However, pig farmers have argued that the pollution caused by pig farms pales in comparison to the smokestacks that can be seen all around the city, the paper reported.

 

According to a 2007 government report on the state of the Pearl River flowing through the region, Dongguan City in 2005 had more than 1,200 heavy industries releasing 78 percent of the industrial waste water. These industries accounted for 8 percent of the city's GDP.

 

Among those, 919 companies situated near the river produce 167,000 tonnes of waste water daily and were identified as the river's main source of pollutants.

 

Authorities were upfront about the allegations however, admitting that they have been actively closing down polluting companies such as cement factories, something that they claimed was the first in the nation.

 

The city's government was coy about other factors, however.

 

Agricultural production in Dongguan accounts for less than 1 percent of the city's GDP.

 

Lands slated for agriculture has shrunk 12.5 percent in the past 3 years while crop production has been reduced by more than half.

 

As the city industrialises, pig farms are being edged out and it is easy to see why: a farm with 100,000 pigs would pay rent in the region of RMB 100,000 a year, whereas an industrial plant could fetch more than 10 times as much.

 

Rentals from established pig farms were negotiated years ago based on old rates whereas new industrial lands could fetch four to five times the rent on the land pig farms are sitting on. 

 

Even as China's pig prices hit new highs this summer, authorities in Huizhou city in the province have been busy clearing out thousands of pig farms in their districts. This meant that huge numbers of farmers, recently relocated from Dongguan and Shenzhou, like nomads in Mongolia, had to be displaced again.

 

In fact, the relocation of large-scale pig farms within the Pearl River Delta has been occurring non-stop since 2001, with most of them moving to the western edge of the province and some even out of it, the paper said.

 

Authorities have driven out pig farms on the pretext of city aesthetics and pollution control.

 

Dongguan was seen as a microcosm of what is happening in the Pearl River Delta region.

 

In more ways than one, the eradication of pig farms make economic sense - while the value of the city's agricultural production grew four-fold over the past 20 years, the value of industrial production grew more than 100-fold, a government report said.

 

There is no need to find reasons for the continuation of backward industries, according to the Chen Guiming, who runs the Trade Development Department of the city. The eradication of the pig industry in the city is an inevitable consequence of the city's development, he said.

 

"Since it is a known fact that pig farms are major pollution sources and people would still have access to pork without them in the city, there is no reason not to eradicate them,' he told the newspaper..

 

The ban on pig farming would not end there, the city's ban would soon extend to a ban on poultry and other livestock, the city's vice mayor told media five days after the announcement of the pig-farm ban, the paper reported.