Fri, Jul 01, 2005 page1

• Chinese official blasts Beijing's pollution record

  UTTER FAILURE The pollution crisis in China is so dire that Beijing's No.1 environment official said the challenge was to keep things as bad as they are

  • AFP
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  China's top environment official has lambasted the nation's failure to enforce environmental laws, saying more enforcement is crucial to stemming worsening pollution.

  "Non-enforcement and lax enforcement of laws and administrative inactivity are the main targets we must aim at," Xie Zhenhua (解振華), director of the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), was quoted by Xinhua news agency as telling a meeting on Wednesday. "The key problems in environmental law enforcement that the government currently needs to face up to and solve is that some local environment authorities do not exercise their law enforcement duties."

  Continued failure to enforce the law would make it difficult to stem expanding environmental degradation that has made China's air, water and soil pollution some of the worst in the world, he said.

  Xie made it clear that pollution in China was so bad that it was not a question of cleaning up but of stopping things from getting worse.

  "We will strive to realize the general goal of basically stopping the deterioration of China's environment," Xie said.

  While reiterating the Communist Party mantra to "rule the country by law," he further lamented the misguided and unregulated practice of maximizing short-term economic profits at the expense of the environment.

  National People's Congress Vice Chairman Sheng Huaren (盛華仁) admitted that the 1984 Law on Prevention and Control of Water Pollution had utterly failed. This had left 300 million rural residents without access to safe drinking water, including 190 million drinking contaminated water.

  "Last year, water from half the tested sections of China's seven major rivers was undrinkable because of pollution," Sheng was quoted as saying by the China Daily in a report on the law's implementation. "The water quality of the country's major rivers has continued to worsen."

  Sheng urged the government to set detailed goals to prevent water pollution and to spend more on trying to stop pollution and soil erosion in the upper reaches of major rivers.

  In cities, where 42 percent of China's 1.3 billion people live, more than two decades of rapid economic development and fast urbanization have made sewage disposal nearly impossible, he said.

  As a result, 90 percent of river sections in urban areas were heavily polluted, as were most urban lakes.

  One-third of non-industrial sewage in the cities went untreated on average, while no treatment was carried out at all in 193 of China's 500 biggest cities, the report said.

  Two-thirds of Chinese cities lack an adequate water supply, and one in every six suffers severe shortages. This was made worse by the widespread pollution of both surface and underground water.

  Sheng said China's sewage-discharge volume had increased year on year, despite the government pouring some 111.5 billion yuan (US$13.5 billion) into sewage treatment since 2001.

  Environmental problems go even further. Experts say raging floods and landslides triggered by torrential rain, which have claimed hundreds of lives in recent weeks, are largely a result of "prolonged reckless human activities in the past decades," Xinhua said.
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