NT Times: In China, Farming FIsh in Toxic Waters

[Guest guest]

note reference to mercury ...

December 15, 2007

In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters

By DAVID BARBOZA

FUQING, China — Here in southern China, beneath the looming

mountains of Fujian Province, lie dozens of enormous ponds filled

with murky brown water and teeming with eels, shrimp and tilapia,

much of it destined for markets in Japan and the West.

Fuqing is one of the centers of a booming industry that over two

decades has transformed this country into the biggest producer and

exporter of seafood in the world, and the fastest-growing supplier

to the United States.

But that growth is threatened by the two most glaring environmental

weaknesses in China: acute water shortages and water supplies

contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff

that includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turn, are discharging

wastewater that further pollutes the water supply.

" Our waters here are filthy, " said Ye Chao, an eel and shrimp farmer

who has 20 giant ponds in western Fuqing. " There are simply too many

aquaculture farms in this area. They're all discharging water here,

fouling up other farms. "

Farmers have coped with the toxic waters by mixing illegal

veterinary drugs and pesticides into fish feed, which helps keep

their stocks alive yet leaves poisonous and carcinogenic residues in

seafood, posing health threats to consumers.

Environmental degradation, in other words, has become a food safety

problem, and scientists say the long-term risks of consuming

contaminated seafood could lead to higher rates of cancer and liver

disease and other afflictions.

No one is more vulnerable to these health risks than the Chinese,

because most of the seafood in China stays at home. But foreign

importers are also worried. In recent years, the European Union and

Japan have imposed temporary bans on Chinese seafood because of

illegal drug residues. The United States blocked imports of several

types of fish this year after inspectors detected traces of illegal

drugs linked to cancer.

This week, officials from the United States and China signed an

agreement in Beijing to improve oversight of Chinese fish farms as

part of a larger deal on food and drug safety.

Yet regulators in both countries are struggling to keep contaminated

seafood out of the market. China has shut down seafood companies

accused of violating the law and blacklisted others, while United

States regulators are concentrating on Chinese seafood for special

inspections.

Fuqing (pronounced foo-CHING) is at the top of the list this year

for refused shipments of seafood from China, with 43 rejections

through November, according to records kept by the United States

Food and Drug Administration. All of those rejections involved the

use of illegal veterinary drugs.

By comparison, Thailand, also a major exporter of seafood to the

United States, had only two refusals related to illegal veterinary

drugs. China as a whole had 210 refusals for illegal drugs.

" For 50 years, " said Wang Wu, a professor at Shanghai Fisheries

University, " we've blindly emphasized economic growth. The only

pursuit has been G.D.P., and now we can see that the water turns

dirty and the seafood gets dangerous. Every year, there are food

safety and environmental pollution accidents. "

Environmental problems plaguing seafood would appear to be a bad

omen for the industry. But with fish stocks in the oceans steadily

declining and global demand for seafood soaring, farmed seafood, or

aquaculture, is the future. And no country does more of it than

China, which produced about 115 billion pounds of seafood last year.

China produces about 70 percent of the farmed fish in the world,

harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend

along the entire eastern seaboard of the country. Farmers mass-

produce seafood just offshore, but mostly on land, and in lakes,

ponds, rivers and reservoirs, or in huge rectangular fish ponds dug

into the earth.

" They'll be a major supplier not just to the U.S., but to the

world, " said Stavis, the chairman of Stavis Seafoods, an

American company that imports Chinese catfish, tilapia and frog

legs.

China began emerging as a seafood power in the 1990s as rapid

economic growth became the top priority in the country. But

environmental experts say that headlong pursuit of higher gross

domestic product has devastated Chinese water quality and endangered

the country's food supply. In Guangdong Province in southern China,

fish contaminated with toxic chemicals like DDT are already creating

health problems.

" There are heavy metals, mercury and flame retardants in fish

samples we've tested, " said Ming Hung Wong, a professor of biology

at Hong Kong Baptist University. " We've got to stop the pollutants

entering the food system. "

More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a

source of drinking water. The biggest lakes in the country regularly

succumb to harmful algal blooms. Seafood producers are part of the

problem, environmental experts say. Enormous aquaculture farms

concentrate fish waste, pesticides and veterinary drugs in their

ponds and discharge the contaminated water into rivers, streams and

coastal areas, often with no treatment.

" Water is the biggest problem in China, " said Leedham, the

business manager at Sino Analytica, an independent food safety

testing firm that works with companies that buy from China. " But my

feeling is China will deal with it, because it has to. It just won't

be a quick process. "

Fishing for Prosperity

Fuqing is called qiaoxiang, or home, for those who go overseas,

because for decades this port city on the East China Sea is where

thousands of people fled as stowaways.

In the 1980s, some emigrants began sending home money and ideas at

just about the time that investors were arriving from Japan and

Taiwan, promising to help the country build fish farms.

" Aquaculture was popular in Japan, so I saw the future, " said Wang

Weifu, a longtime eel producer.

Thousands of peasants who had struggled to earn a living harvesting

rice and potatoes began carving up huge plots, digging rectangular

pits and filling them with water to create fish ponds. Other parts

of the country followed, creating fish farms alongside roads, near

rivers and streams and in big lakes, ponds and reservoirs.

Today, the mighty Yangtze River is lined with fish farms. Historic

Lake Tai is stocked with crab pens. Near Ningde, 90 miles north of

here, thousands of people live in a huge bay area, where they float

on large wooden rafts, feeding and harvesting caged fish, like the

yellow croaker.

The government hoped the building boom would lift millions out of

poverty. And it did. There are now more than 4.5 million fish

farmers in China, according to the Fishery Bureau.

Lin Bingui, 50, is one of them, a former bricklayer with an easy

smile who now manages 20 enormous shrimp and eel ponds in western

Fuqing, on reclaimed land with access to a narrow strait of

seawater.

" This doesn't take a lot of technology, " he said while walking into

an indoor pond, where he raises baby eels. " You just learn it as you

go along. "

The boom did more than create jobs. It made China the only country

that produced more seafood from fish farms than from the sea. It

also helped feed an increasingly prosperous population, a

longstanding challenge in China.

Many growers here struck it rich as well, people like Lin Sunbao,

whose 25-year-old son is now studying at Cambridge University in

England. " My best years were 1992, '93, '94, " he said. " I only had

one aqua farm, and I earned over $500,000 a year. "

As early as the mid-1990s, though, serious environmental problems

began to emerge after electronics and textile manufacturing plants

moved into central Fuqing. Water shortages appeared in the

southeastern part of the city, and some fish farmers say their water

turned black.

Government records document the environmental ills in the region.

The nearby Dongzhang Reservoir, a water source for agriculture and

more than 700,000 people, was recently rated level 5, near the

bottom of the government scale, unfit for fish farming, swimming or

even contact with the human body.

The Long River, the major waterway in Fuqing, has been degraded by

waste dumped by paper factories and slaughterhouses. The government

this year rated large sections of the river below level 5, or so

highly polluted that it is unfit for any use. And nearby coastal

waters which are also heavily fish farmed are polluted with oil,

lead, mercury and copper, according to the State Environmental

Protection Administration in China.

As water quality in Fuqing declined, farmers who often filled their

ponds with too much seafood tried to fight off disease and calm

stressed fish with an array of powerful, and often illegal,

antibiotics and pesticides.

Eel producers, for example, often used nitrofuran to kill bacteria.

But that antibiotic has been banned for use in animal husbandry in

the United States, Europe, Japan, and even China, because it has

caused cancer in laboratory rats.

Importers of Chinese seafood quickly caught on. In recent years, eel

shipments to Europe, Japan and the United States have been turned

back or destroyed because of residues of banned veterinary drugs.

Eel shipments to Japan have dropped 50 percent through August of

this year, dealing a heavy blow in Fuqing.

Chinese farmers say they have stopped using the banned medicines,

and have suffered a 30 percent decline in survival rates of their

fish and other seafood.

" Before 2005, we did use drugs blindly. They were very effective in

fighting disease, " said Wang Weifu, chairman of a local eel

association, noting that drug residues might still be in the

water. " But now we don't dare because of the regulations. "

Some growers have lashed out at Japan, arguing that it keeps raising

the drug residue standard simply to protect its own eel farms

against competition. But growers here say buyers from Japan will

eventually be forced to purchase eels from China.

" Our market will expand in Russia and Southeast Asia, and the E.U., "

Mr. Wang said. " Also, we see big prospects in the Chinese market. In

five or six years, as we transfer our export destinations, Japan

will be begging us. "

Retreating From the Coast

The drive about 175 miles west of Fuqing leads into the lush

subtropical mountains of Fujian Province, where some of China's

richest bamboo and timber reserves can be found. There, near the

city of Sanming, Fuqing eel producers have built a collection of

aquaculture farms, huge cement tubs wedged into the mountainside,

covered by black tarps and stocked with millions of eels.

" This costs a lot more up here, but we had to do it, " said Zheng

Qiuzhen, a longtime Fuqing eel producer who now operates near

Sanming. " We had to do something about the water problems. "

In much of the country, seafood growers are leaving crowded coastal

areas for less developed regions, where the land is cheaper and

there is cleaner water. But they say the overall cost of doing

business so far from the coast is higher, given the expense of

shipping the fish in oxygenated trucks to the processing plant in

Fuqing and their forswearing illegal drugs, which lowers survival

rates and increases the growth period of most fish to five years

from three years.

" You can't find many places as beautiful as this, covered by trees

and bamboo, " said Lin Sunbao, who moved from Fuqing to Sanming. " We

use water from mountain streams. And because our water is better,

it's harder to get disease. "

This is one of the solutions to the water crisis in China: to seek

out virgin territory and essentially start the cycle all over again.

And that worries scientists, who say aquaculture in China is not

just a victim of water pollution but a culprit with a severe

environmental legacy.

Industrial fish farming has destroyed mangrove forests in Thailand,

Vietnam and China, heavily polluted waterways and radically altered

the ecological balance of coastal areas, mostly through the

discharge of wastewater. Aquaculture waste contains fish feces,

rotting fish feed and residues of pesticides and veterinary drugs as

well as other pollutants that were already mixed into the poor

quality water supplied to farmers.

Besides algal blooms, some of the biggest lakes in China, like Lake

Tai, are suffering from eutrophication nutrient bombs, brought on

partly by aquaculture, that can kill fish by depleting the water's

oxygen. The government is forcing aquaculture out of these lakes,

and also away from the Long River in Fuqing.

Places like Sanming may not be pristine for long. Heavy industry is

moving in, lured by mineral riches and incentives from local

governments, which are pushing for development.

And Sanming already has 72 giant eel farms, producing 5,000 tons of

seafood a year. Those farms together use about 280 million gallons

of water a day and then discharge the wastewater the following day,

back into the Sanming environs.

There are efforts to operate aquaculture in a sustainable way. In

Norway, for instance, salmon producers use sophisticated technology,

including underwater cameras, to monitor water quality and how much

fish feed is actually consumed. But nothing like this is being done

in China, and specialists like Li Sifa of Shanghai Fisheries

University insist that Chinese regulations are too lax and that

enforcement efforts are often feeble or nonexistent.

The government has stepped up its inspections of fish farms and

seafood processing plants here, alerting workers of the dangers and

consequences of using illegal drugs. But the drugs have remained a

problem, partly because of poor water quality.

A possible solution to the water woes is to move aquaculture well

out to sea, specialists say, with new technology that allows for

deepwater fish cages served by automatic feeding machines.

The United States is already considering such a plan, partly as a

way to make it less dependent on imports, which now fill 80 percent

of its seafood needs. China is also considering adopting what is now

being called " open ocean " aquaculture.

Currently, China's coastal fish farms face many of the same

challenges as those on land. Waters there are heavily polluted by

oil, lead, mercury, copper and other harsh substances. Veterinary

drugs dropped in shoreline waters may easily spread to neighboring

aquaculture farms and affect species outside the cages, and while

coastal waters are less polluted than those on land, aquaculture

farms, with their intensive production cycles, are prone to be

polluters.

Still, said An Taicheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: " China

has to go to the sea because it's getting harder and harder to find

clean water. Every year there are seafood safety problems. One day,

no one will dare to eat fish from dirty water, and what will farmers

do? "

Chen Yang contributed research from Shanghai and Fuqing.