Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

The night before we left, the professor arranged an organic feast. It was an act of hospitality for me and two of his French students, but it was also a propaganda activity aimed at the local Communist Party leadership. He had invited the township chief and other senior cadres to give them a first taste of naturally grown food. The vegetables, all picked from the farm, took longer to cook than expected. The important guests milled around impatiently as chairs were fetched. After thirty minutes the food arrived. It was indeed a feast of more than a dozen dishes, including eggplants, carrots, leeks, radishes, and chicken soup. But the officials picked at it. By their criteria, I guess this was poor fare. At official banquets in China, guests were usually treated to huge quantities of meat and exotic dishes, both signs of how wealthy the host was and how far the country has come from an era in which families considered themselves fortunate to have pork once a year at spring festival.

Baijiu, the fallback spirit reviver, failed to lift the mood, and the conversation remained at the level of formal speeches and polite noises about the food. We toasted each other, drank, toasted again, and drank some more. Between the gulps of throat-burning baijiu, the conversation spluttered along until Professor Jiang produced a bowl of crispy fried grasshoppers. “Just picked from outside,” the ebullient host smiled. “Won’t you try one?” For a brief moment, insect crunching became a spectator sport with all eyes on the foreigners. It was a consumption dare, like the endless rounds of baijiu. When it was my turn, I paused, took a look at my snack, wondered briefly if I had seen it jumping around earlier in the day, then crunched it between my teeth. It went very well with the organic rice. “Delicious. Can I have some more?”

Despite the taciturnity of the party secretary, Jiang was determined that we should all leave on a high. “Bring your chairs outside. The moon is very beautiful and you can see the stars. There’s no pollution here,” he said, beaming. “Let’s sing some songs.” The cadres seemed eager to leave, but there was no escaping Jiang’s enthusiasm. We sat. They stood. We sang. They loitered close to their car. Jiang had a fine tenor voice as he crooned “My Hometown Yimeng Mountain,” a heartfelt song of praise to the beautiful scenery of Linyi and its abundant crops. When he was done, the French students and I clapped enthusiastically. Even the cadres smiled. It was their excuse to head home.

Why should they be enthusiastic about organic methods? The long-term impact of chemical fertilizers on soil remains fiercely contested throughout the world, hardly surprising given its importance to global food supplies. 26But there is strong evidence that the soil quality is declining. 27Depleted of natural fertility and innate virility, the intercourse between humankind and the ecosystem has to be chemically assisted. Humanity relies more and more on artificial stimulants. Effectively we are pumping the land with agricultural Viagra.

Government officials insist they are not worried about food shortages, though Premier Wen Jiabao has privately asked senior former officials to search for new areas to cultivate. 28There are other good reasons too for exploring alternatives to chemical fertilizers. They pollute waterways, add massively to greenhouse gas emissions, and rely heavily on oil, supplies of which will become increasingly unstable as the earth approaches the peak of supply. 29

Hydrocarbon inputs have been a crucial element of the Green Revolution that has ramped up agricultural production over the past sixty years. We might not actually eat coal as the Meng brothers did while trapped underground, but we all indirectly consume fossil fuels for food. Oil and coal provide the fuel for fertilizer factories, phosphate extraction equipment, tractors, and distribution networks. The Green Revolution has enabled farmland to produce trillions of extra calories in energy, but the surge in food prices in 2008 suggests the return on technology and chemical inputs may be diminishing. This was the expectation of the author of Who Will Feed China?, Earthwatch’s Lester Brown: “We are reaching the limits of what plants can do. Plants are not that different from people in this sense,” he says. “You can get gains up to a point and then it becomes much more difficult—I don’t know of any scientists who are predicting potential advances in grain yields that are comparable with those we saw in the last half century.” 30

Like the poplar, our species is in danger of becoming too successful. By boosting plant yields with nitrates and other fertilizers, human beings have siphoned off almost 40 percent of all land-based photosynthetic capability. 31Given how much of the planet’s energy we are hogging, it is inevitable that other species are declining. The same is true in water systems, where the balance of life is changing due to the runoff of fertility stimulants that mankind pumps into the earth.

My next port of call was the coast. Even the oceans are struggling to meet the demand for food and dilution of waste. The following morning we bade farewell to Jiang and headed off on a four-hour bus ride to Qingdao, a center for oceanic research, fisheries, and beer. This pleasant maritime city of 8 million people sits on the southeastern coast of Shandong. As we arrived, the legacy of the former German treaty port was evident in the Bavarian architecture, the Tsingtao brewery, and the annual beer festival. But the city was moving on with a massive seafront expansion of office blocks and residential towers. Cranes were as thick on the horizon here as anywhere.

Enjoying a crisp coastal breeze, I walked over to the Institute of Oceanology, China’s leading marine research organization. The boffins here are a friendly bunch with a worrying message: pollutants are building up in the oceans. More contaminants are coming from farms than factories. As a result, Professor Zhou Mingjiang, the former head of the institute, believes the main threat to China’s coastal waters is not from heavy metal but from featherlight algae.

Algae are an ancient friend and a new threat. These organisms date back far longer than humanity, almost to the beginning of life on earth. They appear naturally, particularly in the summer when the sea is warm, and could be a source of nutrition for fish and man. But growth patterns have changed. New forms of algae have evolved. Most worryingly, bright green and red blooms are breaking out like nasty rashes across a widening area of lakes and coastlines.

Scientists believe the algae have been stimulated by the sharp rise in nitrates and phosphates in coastal waters as a result of farm fertilizer runoff, untreated human waste, and the food used to stimulate the growth of fish and crabs in aquaculture. This has resulted in an alarming increase of red tides, a manifestation of toxic algae blooms that poison other marine life, choke oxygen from the water, and block the gills of fish.

This problem was almost unknown at the start of the decade, but of late the red tides have grown rapidly in both frequency and size. 32At first, they were only seen in the summer. But now in the warmer south, the red tides appear all through the year. In the worst areas, around the Yangtze and Pearl river estuaries, these harmful algae blooms create “dead zones” where the water is so starved of oxygen it is unable to sustain other forms of life.

Farms are the main source of this environmental stress. Fertilizer nitrates and phosphorus run off into streams and rivers, and eventually lakes and oceans. It is like pumping marine life with steroids or force-feeding growth stimulants. The primary benefactors are the organisms first in the food chain, such as algae and plankton. With the extra nutrition they grow quickly in the form of green slime on lakes or red tides in the sea, to their own benefit and their predators’ detriment. Some algae have become toxic, but most kill by suffocation, choking off oxygen and sunlight.