In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters

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December 15, 2007 In China, Farming Fish in Toxic Waters By DAVID

BARBOZA

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oza/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

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

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/eur\

opean_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 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

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/foo\

d_and_drug_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org> . 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

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cam\

bridge_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 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.

 

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