Food-Supply Contamination Possible

Last spring, sewage and chemical waste flushed into the Huai River and caused a big fish kill, at least the fourth in 18 months.

“It was bad,” a barge captain said. “There were dead fish all over the river.”

The bargeman, who identified himself only by his surname, Lin, doesn’t worry about it. He still eats the river fish.

Lin isn’t alone.

Despite evidence that uncontrolled use of pesticides and rampant industrial pollution are taking a toll on public health, officials do not say much about the effects on food.

The National Environmental Protection Agency says it is not doing research on pollution and public health and refers inquiries to the Ministry of Public Health. That agency says it has 24 regulations on the use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals on fruits, grains and vegetables, but none covering fish.

“There’s no way that there aren’t certain levels of toxins that weren’t in the fish 100 years ago, and there’s no way that won’t affect human health,” said James Mangan, an expert on pest control with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Beijing.

Any effects likely won’t show up for decades, he said.

Despite the lack of studies, officials are not ignoring contamination of the food supply.

The environmental agency, the health ministry and three other departments late last year barred farmers from treating vegetables with pesticides deemed dangerous by the World Health Organization.

Reports of pesticide poisonings and rising rates of cancer appear occasionally in the state-run news media. In late August, 320 peasants were hospitalized and two died after more than 4,000 families in a town in Jiangsu province sprayed their fields with pesticide on the same day, the China Youth Daily said.

In the Huai River basin, “some areas have high incidence of intestinal diseases and cancer, and some villages for years have not had one youth healthy enough to pass the physical for military conscription,” the Guangming Daily reported in November.