Millions of hectares of farmland and 12m tonnes of grain contaminated

The mainland's heavy metal pollution and its mounting health risks have been grossly underestimated, with millions of hectares of farmland and more than 12 million tonnes of grain contaminated, state media reported yesterday.

The latest shocking revelations about health risks in mainland rice in yesterday's edition of China Economic Weekly, a magazine controlled by the People's Daily, came as another bombshell in a week that has refocused attention on the country's poor food safety record.

Up to 10 per cent of rice grown in China was contaminated with toxic metals such as cancer-causing cadmium, the Beijing-based Century Weekly Magazine said last week. Citing researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Economic Weekly said metal poisoning problems had wrought havoc in resource-rich southern and southwestern provinces, such as Yunnan, Hunan, Guangdong and Guangxi, and claimed an extremely high human toll. After years of excessive mining, many villages near mines have gained national notoriety as 'cancer villages'.

Potential economic losses in contaminated rice, enough to feed more than 40 million people, hit 20 billion yuan (HK$23.66 billion) a year, it said, citing 2007 statistics from the Ministry of Land and Resources. The then land minister, Sun Wensheng, was quoted by Xinhua as warning that land pollution problems had reached an alarming level, with at least 10 per cent of China's 120 million hectares of farmland contaminated by metal leaks and other pollutants. But apparently, his warning and a series of stark findings by mainland academics have yet to be taken seriously.

A senior official in one of the key grain-producing provinces was quoted in the report as discouraging scientists from exposing heavy pollution problems, saying the findings were too bleak to be made public.

But metal poisoning has become widespread, with a flurry of heavy-metal pollution scandals in Hunan, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Shandong and Guangdong hitting the headlines in recent months.

Last month, more than 200 children in Anhui, aged between nine months and 16 years, were found to have been poisoned by lead discharged from nearby smelters. Official figures show that at least nine lead poisoning outbreaks occurred last year and 12 metal pollution scandals emerged in 2009.