reporter for the Journal
Chen Xinghua (1905-1995), Mao Zedong's second wife

Editor's note: Since2005Since 2007, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) doctoral supervisor Jiang Gaoming led his students to carry out eco-agriculture practice in the process, found that the rural areas of Jiangjiazhuang, Bianqiao Town, Pingyi County, Shandong Province, are seriously polluted, and summarized the eight major changes in the rural environment through investigation. This article refers to the article "CAS doctoral research report: China's rural areas are full of holes" and then comments on the contradiction between the pressure of farmers' life in the village and the physical impact of environmental pollution on farmers.

30For many years, Jiang Qiangqiang has been getting up early and late every day to drive a tractor and farm, along with his work raising pigs and cows, keeping him busy all year round. Working diligently on his farm work kept him in the1980year became the earliest ten thousand dollar household in the village with a2Over ten thousand dollars in savings. And now, after carrying20With more than 10,000,000 dollars in debt, he was afraid to get sick because in addition to falling behind in his farm work, he would have to spend money again to see a doctor.

Sticking to the front line in the countryside, he didn't go to the city to work and make money like his hometown, but also took over his parents' land as well as other farmers' land to expand his own farming business. It looks like business is doing great, but in fact, his bank account has no extra savings, a large part of the income to be used to pay back the bank interest, once a rich farmer back to poverty into the bank's "wage earners".

Tractors are a good helper for farmers to take care of their farmland, but with the advancement of agricultural mechanization, tractors are gradually being phased out. But are tractors the only ones out?

Jiang Qiangqiang such farmers in the countryside was once brilliant for a while, and finally fell into debt, in the current Chinese countryside is not an example. Guangxi farmer Mo Shengyong in8Years ago, he made a lot of money from killing pigs and selling chickens, married and had children, and had a good family career. With more and more people going out to work and more and more people buying refrigerators in the village, the villagers' demand for fresh pork is getting lower and lower, and Mo Shengyong's pork sales have dropped sharply.

The old saying that "poor couples have everything to lose" came true after Mo Sheng Yong's business collapsed. He quarreled with his wife more and more often, and in the end, she left and he couldn't make his money back. With no other way out, he finally chose to commit suicide by jumping into a well, leaving behind his four young children and the money in his pocket.83.4Dollars.

According to the China Business Industry Research Institute (CBIRI)2015The resident population of mainland China's cities and towns accounted for the following percentage of the total population in 200756.1%,More than the resident population in rural areas. Among these permanent residents, there is no lack of people who have given up giving up farming in the village to work in the city. The China Economic and Social Data Center of Tsinghua University (CESDC, Tsinghua University) reported in its2013The annual survey noted that
exist1980Of the rural population born in 2007 and later who went to the cities to work, 70% were unwilling to return to their villages to work.

Because the wages in the city are much higher than the income from "keeping the acreage" in the village. According to2016Comparison of disposable income per capita in towns and cities in the first half of the year, towns were16957yuan, and in rural areas it is6065dollars, a difference of nearly3The distance is twice as great. In the city, there are many opportunities to work, but in the countryside, the only way out is to farm and raise livestock and poultry for sale, so you can't starve but you can't afford to get rich.

The wages of urban workers are higher than those of rural farmers.2016Per capita disposable income in urban areas in the first half of the year was nearly higher than in rural areas3Times. More and more farmers are abandoning their fields to work in the cities.

However, rural people still can't escape the problems of high medical bills and financial losses caused by natural and man-made disasters in farming, which are directly linked to money. So, farmers like Jiang Qiangqiang chose to expand the area of farmland and the scale of breeding, thinking that a good harvest would solve the problem, and they dared not let themselves fall because there was still a whole family to feed.

Unexpectedly, they took out the crops may not have many people to buy or sell the price is not high, grow into chickens, ducks, geese, cows, pigs and goats may not be able to large-scale inflow into the market because of violations of the private slaughtering, loss of capital for the meager savings of the farmers, is the unbearable weight of life. In order to fill these pits, they choose to continue to expand the scale of planting and breeding, continue to work early in the morning, looking forward to one day to turn the tide.

However, the reality is harsh.

Even though the Government has issued several documents to support the development of the "three rural areas" and has subsidized a lot of money for this purpose, but before it circulates to the hands of the farmers, it is intercepted into their pockets by the people who are enjoying the benefits by paying bribes to the local government officials, and the farming environment that could have been improved remains unchanged, and the money that was supposed to be in their hands has disappeared, and the farmers are still poor.

As for farming, take egg-laying hens as an example. Also on a large scale, diligent farmers feeding their chickens with grains and leftovers can produce a year's worth of300Farmers who claim to have introduced science and technology will inject their chickens with antibiotics and hormones to increase their annual egg production per chicken to as high as400The difference between the two is that naturally produced eggs are less healthy and drug-stimulated eggs are more toxic. The difference between the two is that naturally produced eggs are healthy in small quantities, while medically stimulated eggs are toxic in large quantities, and "toxic eggs" are able to satisfy the egg consumption needs of the urban population. As a result, not many people buy the naturally produced eggs in the countryside because of their low quantity and high price, and ultimately the honest farmers lose out.

Farmers who have been locked into farming and breeding all their lives struggle to survive. They don't die easily because their children need money to go to school, to marry and get married, and to see a doctor ...... They need to live to make money.

The fact is that farmers who die for their family responsibilities don't live well.

Because, as the environment has changed for the worse, so has the body.

In Jiangjiazhuang, Pingyi County, Shandong Province, for example, the rural environment has deteriorated in these directions:

1. Shady farms flush livestock and poultry manure into rivers, which are polluted with heavy metals, antibiotics and hormones that remain undigested by the livestock;

2. 80Deforestation that began in the 1920s has disrupted the ecological balance around the Golden Thread River, where sand dredging in the riverbed, sewage from slaughterhouses, and the inflow of fertilizers, pesticides, and pieces of mulch from farmland have made the water stink and eliminated fish, shrimp, and aquatic plants;

3, after the use of mulch, pesticides and food packaging, plastic bags, old clothes, rotten vegetable leaves and other household garbage without the "plastic limit" control can be seen everywhere, in addition to emitting a burst of stench, but also easy to flow with the rain into the river, downstream drifting into the sea;

4. When farmers burned the weeds on the ground with a fire, the mulch left on the ground that was not picked up was also burned, and the carcinogens drifted into the air with the air and were inhaled by people.

The river, which used to be used by villagers for living and recreation, is so polluted that it stinks, and aquatic plants and animals have long since disappeared.

According to the memories of the villagers, the impression of the Golden Thread River and the present Golden Thread River are completely different: in the era of no running water, the Golden Thread River was the source of drinking water for a dozen or so villages along the river, and people could directly fish water from the river to drink without treatment; in the hot summer, people who had been busy all day long would bathe in this river with the ice-cold water; there were abundant crabs, shrimp, loach and fish in the river waiting to be fished; in summer The hotter the weather, the more joyful the robins in the forest scream, and the children's pleasure after school is to go and stick robins to play.

Now, the river is polluted and the pure Golden Thread River in the villagers' minds is gone. To make matters worse, the villagers' health is also challenged by cancer.

40Years ago, cancer was an unfamiliar term to the villagers of Jiangjiazhuang. And now, when anyone finds a physical ailment, the villagers will naturally be wondering: is it cancer?

According to the death records of villagers counted by the village accountant, in the past there were recorded19In the middle of the year, the village had a total of109People are dead, among them90%More than that is a variety of diseases, mainly cancer, with a small percentage of natural deaths. The average age of death for males69.95Age.
females70.99years. Compared to the national average for the same period, male life expectancy in the village has dropped by1.42age, down for women4.36Age.

Although the villagers are "afraid to talk about cancer", the deteriorating environment has left them with no alternative. Because they have to produce large quantities of food, they are increasingly dependent on the insecticidal effects of pesticides. They are encouraged by plant protection experts to use certain pesticides, and they are threatened by government officials that "if they don't use pesticides, their production will be reduced".70%The pesticides are so sharp that it is tempting to use them as "one-step pesticide", or "one-step pesticide". And with the evolution of pests to the level of not afraid of pesticides, farmers have no choice but to choose to increase the dose of pesticides.

Instead of killing a lot of pests, this one has made the levels of carcinogens in the ground, in the river and in the well water more and more concentrated.

In order to get rid of insects and weeds, farmers choose to use pesticides with strong efficacy, as a result, forcing pests to develop resistance, spraying pesticides can not kill.

Cancer does not only come from dirty river water and food, but also from pesticides that are inhaled into the body when pesticides are being used, and dioxin carcinogens that are emitted when weeds and mulch are burned in the fields also enter the lungs along with the air. As a result, lung cancer, esophageal cancer and intestinal cancer have become the nightmare of rural people.

Those who die without treatment are free from the foul air and poisonous food, but those who live still have to endure these evils that they themselves have sown.

The tragedy of Jiangjiazhuang is just a microcosm of rural China.

2015In 2007, Zhang Taolin, Vice Minister of the State Ministry of Agriculture, confessed that the national use of pesticides in agriculture was32With 10,000 tons, manure pollution from livestock is the biggest source of agricultural pollution. Experts point out that China's use of chemical fertilizers accounts for35%, and excessive input of fertilizers will lead to soil acidification, and acidified soil is a hotbed for the heavy metal cadmium to be active, while cadmium is prone to bone pain disease.

Yes, it's the bone pain disease that shocked the world in the 1960s and 1970s with its symptoms of severe pain around the body.

Environmental degradation and illness are among the things that make Chinese farmers tired, but farmers who have been chained to the land all their lives are slowly losing faith in the "work hard and get rich" principle they used to believe in.

Despite the State Department's efforts this year to5The "Ten Rules on Soil" was released in January to curb soil pollution, but how can the farmers, who are still poor, solve their plight and save their simple values?