NY Times, 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 Richard 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 Peter 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.
