City officials solve a burning issue

Updated: 2014-06-18 13:24

Chinese farmers often burn crop stalk after harvest to clear the fields for the next planting, but the tradition is a major cause of air pollution in both rural and neighboring urban areas. 

However, the situation has been changing in Chengdu and its neighboring cities in recent years. 

Officials from Chengdu, Deyang, Mianyang Meishan and Ziyang agreed at a conference last year to cooperate in prohibiting burning to clear fields. 

"While making meteorological observations we can easily find the unusual burning site on the Chengdu plain and such information will be shared among the five cities," officials said then. 

At the conference, they also agreed to share technologies and experience in helping farmers recycle crop stalk. 

An official from the Chengdu Agriculture Committee said that the city plans to recycle 94 percent of the stalk this year. 

In April officials from the five cities met again and discussed continuing the collaboration. 

They said cooperation has been effective, with not a single day in the last harvest season causing pollution in Chengdu. 

Lai Shijiu, an official in the Qingbaijiang district in Chengdu, is a witness of this positive change. 

He has been working to stop the burning of leftover stalks in crop fields since 2009. 

Every year from April to September the administrative researcher from the local agriculture committee had to travel across towns and villages to inspect whether the farmers are burning stubble leftover from the harvest. 

Lai said that 2013 was a "watershed" in his work with the governments of Chengdu, Deyang and several other neighboring cities starting to cooperate in prohibiting the burning. 

"Before that, the efforts were somehow in vain," he said. 

He still remembered clearly that in May 2012, the entire Qingbaijiang district was covered by black smoke. He brought some colleagues to visit every village in his jurisdiction but found no fires. Later they discovered that farmers in the neighboring city of Guanghan were burning large fields. 

But at that time they could do nothing about it, Lai said. 

The situation changed in 2013 when the local governments established a way to jointly prevent and control stalk burning. 

Lai said when a burning site in a neighboring city is now discovered, they can easily contact the person in charge and put out the fire as soon as possible. 

"We are not only supervising but also learning from each other," Lai said, citing the example of subsidizing inspectors that they learned from the Guanghan city government. 

He said that previously the leaders in towns and villages were not enthusiastic about inspecting stalk burning as they had their own work in the daytime and often had to patrol after work. 

Learning from the experience of Guanghan, the government of Qingbaijiang district now offers a subsidy of 150 yuan per hectare to town-level and village-level governments for inspections. special groups were then set up in many towns and villages to supervise the response and publicize knowledge of recycling crop stubble. 

Handouts to farmers from local officials include a recycling guide, and the contact information for several companies that purchase and recycle stalks. 

In addition, the city government of Chengdu started to implement a penalty on stalk burning this year. Local officials said that the farmers have to pay more than 1,000 yuan ($160) for setting fields on fire.