One-fifth of China's arable land is polluted. (Photo : Getty Images)
The State Council, China's cabinet, has recently published a framework stating its plan to restore 90 percent of the country's contaminated agricultural land, the Global Times reported.
The Cabinet's plan is seen to be significant in ensuring the safety of China's agricultural produce. Statistics show that a fifth of the nation's arable land is currently too polluted to use.
The action plan was first drafted in 2013 and has undergone over 50 modifications to secure a comprehensive version to combat land pollution.
The document also serves as the third State Council paper aimed at curbing pollution. The first two, which tackled plans on how to deal with air and water pollution, were released in 2013 and 2015, respectively.
Apart from the 2020 deadline, the document's goals also include getting soil pollution risks under control by 2030 and establishing a "virtuous" ecosystem cycle by 2050.
Furthermore, the plan suggests that polluters should be the one responsible for solving the problems they have caused. It is only when the liable party cannot be established that the mission will be transferred to the local government.
The Cabinet's plan also talks about the principle of "polluters pay," which has been adopted by many countries like the U.S. and Germany.
However, as majority of China's polluted soil can be found in farmlands, it is less likely to attract investments from the private sector, so it will be the government who is tasked to pay for anti-pollution efforts, experts agreed.
Based on 2016 reports culled by 22 various organizations, around 63 percent of China's 316 soil remediation endeavors from 2007 to 2015 were paid for out of the public purse.
Sheng Guangyao, a research fellow at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies, noted that it is hard to detect soil pollution compared with water and air, citing a time-consuming obstacle the government may face in this initiative.
Though last year the government has already allocated 2.8 billion yuan for anti-pollution campaigns, experts claim that this effort is still not enough to combat the pressing issue.
Additionally, despite the release of the said action plan, Ada Kong, chief of Greenpeace East Asia's Toxics Campaign, noted that China still needs specific laws regulating soil pollution in order to effectively implement the measures stipulated in the document.
