China Admits Massive Soil Pollution

China reports that 19% of its arable lands are contaminated with heavy metals:

The report, based on a seven-year survey covering 2.4 million square miles, found that about 16% of the country's soil and 19% of its arable land was polluted to one degree or another. The vast majority of the pollution came from inorganic sources such as heavy metals, it said. China's total land area is 3.7 million square miles.
The most common inorganic pollutants found in China's soil were the heavy metals cadmium, nickel and arsenic, according to Thursday's report. Cadmium and arsenic, both known to cause chronic health problems, are byproducts of mining.
Nearly 3% of arable land in China was found to be either moderately or seriously polluted, the report said, without defining what those levels of contamination mean. Pollution was particularly severe in eastern China's Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta in the south and old industrial zones in the northeast, it said.
Pollution of farmland is of particular concern in China because of how little of it has. According to the most recent national land survey, China had 334 million acres of arable land at the end of 2012, roughly 37 million acres above the government's "red line" for the amount of farmland necessary to feed the country's population.
Already, some 8.24 million acres of arable land has become unfit for farming, China's Ministry of Land and Resources disclosed in December. Environmentalists say the majority of the remaining land is of poor or moderate quality, having been stripped of its productivity by decades of heavy fertilizer and pesticide use.
So much polluted soil means China will likely have to begin importing more food. "China will need to ease pressure on its natural resource base and import more of its food over the long-term," said Fred Gale, an economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. "Agriculture is impacted by industrial pollution but also creates a lot of pollution itself," he said, citing waste and ecological damage caused by China's growing taste for meat.
In April 2013, the discovery of unusually high quantities of cadmium in batches of rice grown in Hunan—the country's top rice-producing region, as well as a top-five producer of nonferrous metals like copper and lead—set off worries about farmland and sent prices for Hunan rice tumbling by as much as 14%. 

I've covered this subject here before. Deborah Blum has covered how rice absorbs heavy metals, and while I think I've posted on that, I can't find it.  The important thing is that massive industrialization without environmental protection is royally screwing China.  Keep that in mind next time you hear Republicans talking about how EPA destroys American jobs.  I like to eat, and from what I can tell of all the other obese people in the U.S., apparently a lot of other people do, too.  I also like to farm, and poisoned soil really, really makes me sad.  What a disaster.