User:Iriswang/Polluted groundwater in China

About 40 percent of China's agricultural land is irrigated with underground water, of which 90 percent is polluted, according to Liu Xin, a food and health expert and a member of an advisory body to parliament, told the Southern Metropolitan Daily. In February 2013, Xu Chi wrote in the Shanghai Daily, “Shallow underground water in China has been severely polluted and the situation is deteriorating rapidly, with water quality data in 2011 showing that 55 percent of underground supplies in 200 cities was of bad or extremely bad quality, according to the Ministry of Land and Resources. A review of underground water carried out by the ministry from 2000 to 2002 showed that nearly 60 percent of shallow underground water was undrinkable, the Beijing News reported yesterday. Some reports in the Chinese media said water pollution was so severe in some regions that it caused cancer in villagers and even led to cows and sheep which drank it to become sterile. [Source: Xu Chi, Shanghai Daily, February 25, 2013] Jonathan Kaiman wrote in The Guardian, “A recent government study found that groundwater in 90 percent of China's cities is contaminated, most of it severely. Chinese media responded with surprising urgency – the Straits Times newspaper in southeastern Fujian province presented the findings in a full front-page spread."Groundwater is a key source of drinking water, industrial and agricultural use, especially in northern China," said Ma. "If this resource gets contaminated, it's far more difficult to restore than surface water or the air." [Source: Jonathan Kaiman, The Guardian, February 21, 2013 Chemical companies in east China's Weifang City were accused of using high-pressure injection wells to discharge waste sewage more than 1,000 meters underground for years, seriously polluting underground water and posing a cancer threat. Kaiman wrote: “Ground zero for the recent flurry of online outrage is Weifang, a city of 8 million in coastal Shandong province. Weifang's internet users have accused local paper mills and chemical plants of directly pumping industrial waste into the city's water supply 1,000 meters underground, causing cancer rates in the area to skyrocket. "I was just angry after receiving information from Web users saying that the groundwater in Shandong had been polluted and I forwarded it online," Deng Fei, a reporter whose microblog posts sparked the allegations, told the state-run Global Times. "But it came as a surprise to me that after I sent out these posts, many people from different places in northern and eastern China all complained that their hometowns have been similarly polluted." Weifang officials have offered a reward of about £10,000 to anyone who can provide evidence of illegal wastewater dumping. According to a Weifang Communist party committee spokesperson, local authorities have investigated 715 companies and have yet to find any evidence of wrongdoing. In September 2013, Xinhua reported on a village in Henan where the groundwater has been badly polluted. The news agency said that locals claimed the deaths of 48 villagers from cancer are linked to the pollution. Research carried out by Yang Gonghuan, a professor of public health at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences has also linked high rates of cancer to polluted river water in Henan, Anhui and Shangdong provinces. [Source: Jennifer Duggan, The Guardian, October 23, 2013]