{"id":34580,"date":"2013-06-27T18:26:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-27T18:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=34580 "},"modified":"2013-06-27T18:26:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-27T18:26:00","slug":"34580-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=34580","title":{"rendered":"Black Apples Grow Near Northern China Mines"},"content":{"rendered":"
2013-06-27      <\/div>
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A Chinese woman looks on as she sits on a trailer with apples in Beijing, April 14, 2013.<\/div>
 AFP<\/div>
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Orchards in the northern Chinese province of Hebei have produced a crop of black apples this year amid growing complaints over pollution from extensive mining in the area, farmers said this week.<\/div>
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Farmers in Hebei’s Tumu village, which lies just 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) from one of the biggest open-cast mining districts in severely polluted northern China, say there is little to protect their crops from airborne dirt and dust from the mines.<\/div>
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“We grow fruit orchards over here, but nobody wants to grow fruit any more,” a farmer in Huailai county, which oversees Tumu village, told state media in a recent interview.<\/div>
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“There’s no way to sell it,” he said. “Who wants it if it’s polluted?”<\/div>
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“Take apples, for example. They are all black around the hollow of the stalk. Who’s going to buy them?”<\/div>
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A Huailai resident surnamed Hou said many local farmers had tried to petition the authorities with complaints about pollution from nearby mines, but to no avail.<\/div>
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“There are a lot of instances of corruption,” she said. “There are coal mines and iron ore mines.”<\/div>
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“I know a lot of people have tried petitioning over this, and that there is pollution,” she said.<\/div>
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“But the authorities don’t send anyone to sort it out. They have laws, but they don’t follow them,” Hou said. “There is no punishment for breaking the law.”<\/div>
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Worst air quality<\/div>
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Li Yulian, a petitioner from nearby Zhangjiakou city, said the worst air quality was found in the mining district to the south of the city.<\/div>
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“Where I live, to the north, the air is very good, with blue sky and white clouds,” she said. “That’s because there aren’t really many factories to pollute it.”<\/div>
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“To the south of Zhangjiakou, in Huailai county, there is a great deal of pollution from mining dust, while in Xuanbei county it’s stone dust pollution,” Li said.<\/div>
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An official who answered the phone at the Zhangjiakou environmental protection bureau said he was unaware of the problem, however.<\/div>
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“We don’t have a special department for receiving cases, or a reporting center [for violations of environmental law], so I’m not sure what issues the local people are reporting with regard to pollution,” the official said.<\/div>
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“You should get in touch with the propaganda department for the details, and they’ll give you a unified answer,” he said.<\/div>
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China has promised major steps to improve air quality as smog and greenhouse gas emissions continue to plague the country, cloaking much of the northern regions in thick brown smog.<\/div>
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The State Council last week announced a package of 10 anti-pollution measures to ease the crisis, including a pledge to slash pollution from six smog-producing industries by 2017, official media reported.<\/div>
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Officials hope the 2017 target will speed up improvements in the six dirtiest industries that account for more than 70 percent of China’s emissions.<\/div>
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Atmospheric “particulate matter pollution” was the fourth-leading risk factor for deaths in China in 2010, ranking after dietary habits, high blood pressure, and smoking, according to data gathered for the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study.<\/div>
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A recent study has linked China’s air pollution to 1.2 million premature deaths in a single year.<\/div>
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Chinese consumers are reeling in the wake of a string of public health scandals affecting foodstuffs and medicines in recent years, including melamine-tainted infant formula milk, used “gutter” cooking oil, and tainted vaccines.<\/div>
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A report released on Tuesday by the international group Greenpeace said that commercially grown herbs for the traditional Chinese medicine market are now coated in a toxic cocktail of pesticide residues.<\/div>
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Reported by Wen Yuqing for RFA’s Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.<\/div>
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 <\/div>Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>the<\/span><\/a> <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>original article<\/a><\/a><\/a>.<\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/a><\/span><\/strong>
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<div>Farmers in Hebei's Tumu village, which lies just 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) from one of the biggest open-cast mining districts in severely polluted northern China, say there is little to protect their crops from airborne dirt and dust from the mines.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}