It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Crop-killing weeds advance across US farmland as chemicals lose effectiveness Kochia is seen in a field in Nyssa
Kochia is seen along a roadside adjacent to a sugar beet field in Fruitland Kochia is seen in a sugar beet field in Parma Kochia is seen in a sugar beet field near Nampa The weed kochia is seen in a field in Nyssa
Tue, January 16, 2024 By Rod Nickel and Tom Polansek
WINNIPEG, Manitoba/CHICAGO (Reuters) - Crop-killing weeds such as kochia are advancing across the U.S. northern plains and Midwest, in the latest sign that weeds are developing resistance to chemicals faster than companies including Bayer and Corteva can develop new ones to fight them.
In many cases weeds are developing resistance against multiple herbicides, scientists said.
Reuters interviewed two dozen farmers, scientists, weed specialists and company executives and reviewed eight academic papers published since 2021 which described how kochia, waterhemp, giant ragweed and other weeds are squeezing out crops in North Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota as chemicals lose their effectiveness.
Over the last two decades, chemical companies have reduced the share of revenue devoted to research and development spending and are introducing fewer products, according to AgbioInvestor, a UK-based firm that analyzes the crop protection sector.
Farmers say their losing battle with weeds threatens grain and oilseed harvests at a time when growers are grappling with inflation and extreme weather linked to climate change.
"We're in for big problems over the next 10 years for sure," said Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, a group of scientists in over 80 countries that maintains a global database. "We are in for a real shake-up."
The database records reduced effectiveness for glyphosate, one of the most common herbicides, against 361 weed species, including 180 in the U.S., affecting corn, soy, sugar beets and other crops.
Some 21 weed species globally showed resistance to dicamba, the most recent major U.S. chemical, which launched in 2017.
Environmental groups argue that farmers should embrace natural weed-control methods instead of chemicals.
Kochia, which spreads as many as 30,000 seeds per plant, can cut yields by up to 70% if left unchecked, according to Take Action, a farmer resource program of the United Soybean Board.
Other factors, including the development of more robust seeds, have pushed overall global crop yields higher. But scientists expect weed problems to worsen, with some weeds showing resistance to chemicals even on first exposure.
'REALLY SCARY'
In Douglas, North Dakota, farmer Bob Finken sprayed dicamba and glyphosate to kill late-season weeds. Neither product eliminated kochia.
"That was really scary," said Finken, 64. "Each year seems to get a little worse."
Finken was forced to clear the weeds with harvesting equipment, which risks clogging expensive machinery.
Other farmers are hiring workers to pull weeds by hand, said Sarah Lovas, an agronomist with GK Technology, a precision agriculture firm.
North Dakota was the largest spring wheat producing state in 2023 and ninth-biggest soybean grower.
Five of North Dakota's 53 counties have confirmed populations of dicamba-resistant kochia, a year after it was first reported in the state, North Dakota State University weed specialist Joe Ikley said.
"It's just a matter of time before it hits your farm," said Monte Peterson, 65, who grows soybeans near Valley City, North Dakota.
LAB SCALE-BACK
Chemical producers Bayer, Corteva and FMC say longer development and regulatory processes have constrained new products to combat weed resistance. Industry executives say regulators have become more stringent about environmental and health impacts.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said standards for approving new herbicides have not substantially changed since 1996. However, the EPA said recent efforts to assess the impact of new active ingredients on threatened plants and wildlife have delayed some decisions.
The EPA did not estimate the increased processing time. The agency said it expedites reviews of lower-risk products.
Farm chemical companies spent 6.2% of sales revenue on development of new active ingredients in 2020, down from 8.9% in 2000, AgbioInvestor said. Its data showed the introduction of new active ingredients fell by more than half in 2022 from 2000.
Instead, companies have expanded uses of existing products like dicamba, glufosinate and 2,4-D.
FMC plans the 2026 launch of an herbicide to kill grassy weeds in rice crops based on the industry's first new mode of action, a term for the way a chemical kills a weed, in three decades.
The herbicide was in development for 11 years. FMC hopes it will generate $400 million in sales within a decade, a fraction of the roughly $8 billion global glyphosate market.
"If we don't keep developing the new products, we are going to run into a wall where growers don't have the tools to combat the pests," CEO Mark Douglas said. "And then ultimately you face food security issues."
The world's biggest agriculture chemical and seed company, Germany's Bayer, hopes to produce its first new mode of action herbicide in over 30 years by 2028.
"We're really desperate for (new modes of action) if we're going to sustain uses for farmers," said Bob Reiter, head of research and development for Bayer's crop science division.
Two decades ago, companies commercialized a product for every 50,000 candidates, but it now takes 100,000 to 150,000 attempts, Reiter said.
U.S.-based Corteva said it has incorporated sustainability criteria, such as reduced groundwater risk, in its research and development, aiming to clear the path with regulators.
It hopes that approach will shorten the regulatory process when it introduces a fungicide with a new mode of action against Asian soybean rust disease in Brazil around 2027, said Ramnath Subramanian, vice-president of crop protection research and development. He did not say how much shorter the process may be.
Bill Freese, scientific director of the Center for Food Safety in Washington, said farmers should shift away from crops genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides, which lead to plants becoming resistant to multiple chemicals through repeated sprayings.
"It's like this toxic spiral," Freese said. "There's no end in sight."
(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Tom Polansek in Chicago; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Suzanne Goldenberg)
Wednesday, January 03, 2024
Record Declines in Grain Prices May Ease Global Food Crisis
Corn futures fell 31%, and wheat contracts decreased 21%, the largest drop since 2013.
The decline in grain prices is attributed to bumper crops in Brazil, the U.S., and Russia, along with expectations of reduced costs for staple foods and animal feed.
Despite the decline in global food prices, there's still uncertainty about the pace of price reductions and its impact on preventing food riots in emerging markets.
Despite the El Nino-related weather disturbances affecting key agricultural areas globally and the disruptions in the Black Sea stemming from the war in Ukraine, there is encouraging data suggesting further easing in food inflation in the new year. This development comes amid the soaring risks of food riots in emerging markets, as the weakening of EM currencies against the dollar has made staple foods increasingly more expensive for poorer populations worldwide.
Bloomberg data shows corn and wheat prices have recorded their largest annual declines in a decade. This is primarily because of bumper crops in key ag regions and might lead to further easing of food inflation into the first half of 2024.
Corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade plunged 31% this year, and wheat contracts fell 21% - the largest annual declines since 2013. Soybeans were down 15%. This led the Bloomberg Grains Spot Subindex to slide 22.8%. This is good news for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization World Food Price Index, which has already come off record highs.
"The rout was driven by bumper crops in key crop suppliers Brazil, US and Russia following years of disruptions caused by extreme weather, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine that pushed prices to record highs in 2022," Bloomberg wrote in a note, adding, "Lower prices for staple grains could bring down the cost of bread and make it less expensive to feed livestock, dairy herds and even biofuels. Analysts are anticipating even lower prices for corn and soybeans in 2024, while wheat is expected to rebound amid tighter supplies."
However, there is still uncertainty about whether global food prices will decrease swiftly enough to prevent food riots in EM countries. The current food price levels are comparable to those that sparked the Arab Spring riots in the Middle East in 2010.
Sara Menker, founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, warned last month in an interview with Bloomberg TV on the sidelines of Bloomberg's New Economy Forum in Singapore that the current food crisis surpassed the one in 2007-08. She explained this is mostly because of elevated crop prices and steep declines in local currencies against the dollar.
By Zerohedge.com
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Arizona alfalfa farmers clash with foreign firms over water use
WENDEN, Ariz. (AP) — A blanket of bright green alfalfa spreads across western Arizona’s McMullen Valley, ringed by rolling mountains and warmed by the hot desert sun.
Matthew Hancock’s family has used groundwater to grow forage crops here for more than six decades. They’re long accustomed to caprices of Mother Nature that can spoil an entire alfalfa cutting with a downpour or generate an especially big yield with a string of blistering days.
But concerns about future water supplies from the valley’s ancient aquifers, which hold groundwater supplies, are bubbling up in Wenden, a town of around 700 people where the Hancock family farms.
Some neighbors complain their backyard wells have dried up since the Emirati agribusiness Al Dahra began farming alfalfa here on about 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) several years ago.
It is unknown how much water the Al Dahra operation uses, but Hancock estimates it needs 15,000 to 16,000 acre feet a year based on what his own alfalfa farm needs. He says he gets all the water he needs by drilling down hundreds of feet. An acre-foot of water is roughly enough to serve two to three U.S. households annually.
Hancock said he and neighbors with larger farms worry more that in the future state officials could take control of the groundwater they now use for agriculture and transfer it to Phoenix and other urban areas amid the worst Western drought in centuries.
“I worry about the local community farming in Arizona,” Hancock said, standing outside an open-sided barn stacked with hay bales.
Concerns about the Earth’s groundwater supplies are front of mind in the lead-up to COP28, the annual United Nations climate summit opening this week in the Emirati city of Dubai. Gulf countries like the UAE are especially vulnerable to global warming, with high temperatures, arid climates, water scarcity and rising sea levels.
“Water shortages have driven companies to go where the water is,” said Robert Glennon, a water policy and law expert and professor emeritus at the University of Arizona.
Experts say tensions are inevitable as companies in climate-challenged countries like the United Arab Emirates increasingly look to faraway places like Arizona for the water and land to grow forage for livestock and commodities such as wheat for domestic use and export.
“As the impacts of climate change increase, we expect to see more droughts,” said Karim Elgendy, a climate change and sustainability specialist at Chatham House think tank in London. “This means more countries would look for alternative locations for food production.”
Without groundwater pumping regulations, rural Arizona is especially attractive, said Elgendy, who focuses on the Middle East and North Africa. International corporations have also turned to Ethiopia and other parts of Africa to develop enormous farming operations criticized as “land grabbing.”
La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin welcomes a recent crackdown by Arizona officials on unfettered groundwater pumping long allowed in rural areas, noting local concerns about dried up wells and subsidence that’s created ground fissures and flooding during heavy rains.
“You’re starting to see the effects of lack of regulation,” she said. “Number one, we don’t know how much water we have in these aquifers, and we don’t know how much is being pumped out.”
Irwin laments that foreign firms are “mining our natural resource to grow crops such as alfalfa … and they’re shipping it overseas back to their country where they’ve depleted their water source.”
Gary Saiter, board chairman and general manager of the Wenden Domestic Water Improvement District, said utility records showed the surface-to-water depth at its headquarters was a little over 100 feet (30 meters) in the 1950s, but it’s now now about 540 feet (160 meters).
Saiter said that over those years, food crops like cantaloupe have been replaced with forage like alfalfa, which is water intensive.
“I believe that the legislature in the state needs to step up and actually put some control, start measuring the water that the farms use,” Saiter said.
Gov. Katie Hobbs in October yanked the state’s land lease on another La Paz County alfalfa farm, one operated by Fondomonte Arizona, a subsidiary of Saudi dairy giant Almarai Co. The Democrat said the state would not renew three other Fondomonte leases next year, saying the company violated some lease terms.
Fondomonte denied that, and said it will appeal the decision to terminate its 640-acre (259-hectare) lease in Butler Valley. Arizona has less control over Al Dahra, which farms on land leased from a private North Carolina-based corporation.
Glennon, the Arizona water policy expert, said he worked with a consulting group that advised Saudi Arabia more than a decade ago to import hay and other crops rather than drain its aquifers. He said Arizona also must protect its groundwater.
“I do think we need sensible regulation,” said Glennon. “I don’t want farms to go out of business, but I don’t want them to drain the aquifers, either.”
Seeking crops for domestic use and export, Al Dahra farms wheat and barley in Romania, operates a flour mill in Bulgaria, and owns milking cows in Serbia. It runs a rice mill in Pakistan and grows grapes in Namibia and citrus in Egypt. It serves markets worldwide.
The company is controlled by the state-owned firm ADQ, an Abu Dhabi-based investment and holding company. Its chairman is the country’s powerful, behind-the-scenes national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a brother of ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The company did not respond to numerous emails and voicemails sent to its UAE offices and its subsidiary Al Dahra ACX in the U.S. seeking comment about its Arizona operation.
But on its website, Al Dahra acknowledges the challenges of climate change, noting “the continuing decrease in cultivable land and diminishing water resources available for farming.” The firm says it considers water and food security at ”the core of its strategy” and uses drip irrigation to optimize water use.
Foreign and out-of-state U.S. farms are not banned from farming in Arizona, nor from selling their goods worldwide. U.S. farmers commonly export hay and other forage crops to countries including Saudi Arabia and China.
In Arizona’s Cochise County that relies on groundwater, residents worry that the mega-dairy operated there by Riverview LLP of Minnesota could deplete their water supplies. The company did not respond to a request for comment about its water use.
“The problem is not who is doing it, but that we are allowing it to be done,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “We need to pass laws giving more control over groundwater uses in these unregulated areas.”
A former director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, Ferris helped draw up the state’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act that protects aquifers in urban areas like Phoenix but not in rural agricultural areas.
Many people mistakenly believe groundwater is a personal property right, Ferris said, noting that the Arizona Supreme Court has ruled there’s only a property right to water once it has been pumped.
In Arizona, rural resistance to limits on pumping remains strong and efforts to create rules have gone nowhere in the Legislature. The Arizona Farm Bureau has pushed back at narratives that portray foreign agribusiness firms like Al Dahra as groundwater pirates.
The state is “the wild West” when it comes to groundwater, said Kathryn Sorensen, research director at the Kyl Center. “Whoever has the biggest well and pumps the most groundwater wins.”
“Arizona is blessed to have a very large and productive groundwater,” she added. “But just like an oil field, if you pump it out at a significant rate, then you deplete the water and it’s gone.”
Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai contributed to this report.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
AUSTRALIA
‘Where did I go wrong?’ The scientist who tried to raise the climate alarm
Graham Readfearn
GUARDIAN AUS Mon, 20 November 2023
“I often wonder: where did I go wrong?” Graeme Pearman says. “Why didn’t people respond? Is that my responsibility?”
When Guardian Australia meets him at his home on the outskirts of Melbourne, the veteran climate scientist is frustrated.
“If you go through the whole process and the rigour of conducting science, [you think] at the end of the day surely people will understand what you’re saying – they will incorporate those risks into what they do,” he says.
“Well, it doesn’t work that way.
“The reality is that for a period of nearly two decades, Australia went backwards [on climate action]. From a personal perspective, yes, it’s frustrating.”
Outside two alpacas are busy keeping the grass down. A pagoda over a deck is heaving with pink wisteria flowers and inside on a kitchen bench Pearman has been struggling with an impossible jigsaw of a Van Gogh painting.
The calmness and lazy beauty of it all is jarring, given we’re here to talk about his life’s work studying a phenomenon that could send countless species extinct, reshape coastlines from rising seas and supercharge storms and wildfires. More than 50 years ago, Pearman was working at the government science agency the CSIRO and measuring how many CO2 molecules were in the air.
He went on to establish the government’s first climate science program and brief three prime ministers (Hawke, Keating and Howard) on climate change. Later, after an acrimonious parting with the CSIRO, he would travel from community groups to fossil fuel company board rooms giving presentations on climate change.
If there is such a thing as the grandfather of Australian climate science, then 82-year-old Pearman is surely a contender.
Six flasks of air
In 1971, in Pearman’s first job at the CSIRO, he and his colleague John Garratt were asked by their boss Bill Priestley to develop, test and then install equipment that could measure how much carbon dioxide there was in the atmosphere.
Every Thursday Pearman and Garratt drew air samples from a 10 metre-high mast above a wheatfield in Rutherglen, Victoria.
What shocked Pearman was that his measurements were a close match to those taken in Hawaii by the American scientist Charles Keeling – 8,600km away and in a different hemisphere.
“The curiosity for the two of us was why should the concentration be the same?” Pearman says. “Above this growing wheat crop – and on the top of a mountain in Hawaii. Two hemispheres that are totally different. Why should that be the case?”
Since the late 1950s, Keeling had been finding the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was creeping up and by the late 1960s he was blaming the rise on fossil fuel burning.
Pearman suspected Keeling was wrong and that the rise was down to “drifting standards” in the way the measurements were being taken.
“We thought: he’s got to be wrong. How could humans, mere humans, actually influence the global climate?
“But within about a year, we knew Keeling was right.”
In 1974 Pearman took six flasks of Australian air samples to laboratories around the world, including Keeling’s, where scientists were also measuring CO2.
Within a few years, different readings were being taken from planes and Pearman had helped set up a long-term monitoring station for atmospheric gases at Cape Grim on the north-west tip of Tasmania.
The very first carbon dioxide reading at Cape Grim in May 1976 showed CO2 at 328 parts per million. On the day of our interview, the latest reading shows 417 ppm (an increase of 26%).
Australia has just had its warmest winter on record, during what will very likely be the globe’s hottest year on record.
A fact easily forgotten in the blast radius of the last decade of Australia’s climate wars is that in 1990 the Hawke government wanted to introduce a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the year 2005.
In 1989 the UN awarded Pearman and the CSIRO a global award, recognising Australians were as well informed on climate change as almost any other community in the world.
Pearman had organised a conference in 1987 where he had asked scientists working across the economy – from irrigation to agriculture, energy and the natural environment – to present their thoughts on the potential implications of climate change for their sectors.
Pearman would eventually make his way through the ranks to become the chief of CSIRO’s atmospheric research division.
By the early 1990s, it seemed Australia was well positioned and well informed.
But Pearman admits he was naive to think that policy and action would just follow the science. Political pressure and vested interests
Just as Pearman and his colleagues were telling the public and politicians about the risks from climate change, Australia’s fossil fuel industries were bringing their weight and cash to the policy table. Ultimately, the science was outgunned by vested interests.
In 2003 Pearman joined the Australian Climate Group – a group of experts convened by WWF and a multinational insurance group. In 2004 the group released a report saying Australia should cut its emissions by 60% by 2050.
Joining this group would be Pearman’s downfall.
He suspects – but doesn’t know for sure – that CSIRO had come under “a huge amount of pressure” from the government because of the group’s suggestions that fossil fuel use would need to be curtailed.
“I think it was from a government level of some sort to say that we don’t want people actually talking down the future of these particular commodities,” he says. “And I don’t think I ever did that – I simply pointed out what the consequences of pursuing that future would be.
“So all of a sudden I found myself in a discussion … about how it might be a good time to go. I felt devastated.”
Pearman took an academic role at Monash University and started a consultancy to provide briefings on the latest science to industry and the community.
He has racked up more than 500 presentations and continues to write scientific papers.
But he continues to be frustrated at the lack of action.
“We still have people talking about utilising massive gas reserves that should never come out of the ground. Because whether we burn them or someone else burns them, they will contribute to further warming.
“We’ve got to stop this. Not just Australia, but the global community. But Australia should be leading the way, not dragging its feet.”
Pearman is an instinctively optimistic character, but the country’s continued promotion of fossil fuels is causing that optimism to become “overwhelmed by pessimism” about the future.
It is part of the human condition to care about other species, he says. But at the same time “it is us as humans that have created this way of looking at the world – created the importance of wealth generation compared with other values that we might have”.
“And we’re not going to turn that around very quickly.”
What does give Pearman “some sense of security” for the future is that young people are well informed.
“I think they need to have courage – to find courage if they haven’t got it – to accept that the world is different and needs to be different into the future and that they should stand up and be part of the transition.
“The older people of the community have had their time. It’s their time now.
“Stand up and take responsibility and do what you think is necessary.”
Saturday, November 18, 2023
To Project Power Globally, China Has Become the Superpower of Seafood
A Chinese squid jigger at night (Credit: Einar Ollua and Esteban Medina San Martin, March 22, 2022)
In the early morning hours of March 8, 2021, a small inflatable boat powered by an outboard motor covertly made its way into the port of Montevideo to unload a dying deckhand, and then sped away.
The deckhand, a slight 20-year-old Indonesian named Daniel Aritonang, had been at sea for the previous year and a half, working on a Chinese squid-fishing ship called the Zhen Fa 7. Now he was dumped dockside, barely conscious, with two black eyes, bruises along the sides of his torso, and rope marks around his neck. His feet and hands were bloated, the size of melons.
Paramedics put Aritonang in an ambulance and rushed him to a nearby hospital. Jesica Reyes, a local interpreter, was summoned, and when she arrived she found Aritonang in the ambulance bay. He told her that he’d been beaten, choked and deprived of food for days. As doctors took him away to the emergency room, he began crying and shaking. “Please, where are my friends?” he asked her, and then whispered, “I’m scared.”
Montevideo, one of the world’s busiest fishing ports, is popular among Chinese squid ships, several hundred of which in recent years have been targeting the rich high-seas fishery that lies off South America’s southeastern coast. The ships are drawn to Montevideo as an option for refueling, making repairs and restocking, in part because the next best options, in Brazil, Argentina and the Malvinas Islands, are either too expensive or closed to them.
Many of the crew on Chinese ships are Indonesian, and when they arrive in Montevideo dead, injured or sick, port officials contact Reyes, who is among the only interpreters in the city who speaks Bahasa, Indonesia’s official language. She gets calls often to manage the families of dead workers. For most of the past decade, one dead body has been dropped off every other month on average in this port, mostly from Chinese squid ships.
In taking the job on the Zhen Fa 7, Aritonang had stepped into what may be the largest maritime operation the world has ever known. Fueled by the world’s growing and insatiable appetite for seafood, China has dramatically expanded its reach across the high seas, with a distant-water fleet of as many as 6,500 ships, which is more than double its closest global competitor. China also now runs terminals in more than 90 ports around the world and has bought political loyalties, particularly in coastal countries in South America and Western Africa. It has become the world’s undisputed seafood superpower.
But China’s pre-eminence on the water has come at a cost. Fishing is ranked as the deadliest job in the world and, by many measures, Chinese squid ships are among the most brutal. Debt bondage, human trafficking, violence, criminal neglect, and death are common in this fleet. When the Environmental Justice Foundation interviewed 116 Indonesian crew members who had worked between September 2020 and August 2021 on Chinese distant-water vessels, roughly 97 percent of them reported having experienced some form of debt bondage or confiscation of guaranteed money and documents, and 58 percent reported having seen or experienced physical violence.
The fleet is also ranked as the largest purveyor of illegal fishing in the world. A 2022 review of illegal fishing incidents that occurred between 1980 and 2019, commissioned by the European Parliament, found that nearly half of the cases where the vessel type was identified were committed by squid ships.
Compared to other countries, China has been not only less responsive to international regulations and media pressure when it comes to labor rights or ocean preservation, but also less transparent about its fishing boats and processing factories, said Sally Yozell, the director of the Environmental Security Program at the Stimson Center, a research organization in Washington, D.C. Since a large proportion of fish consumed in the U.S. is caught or processed by China, she said, it is especially difficult for companies to know whether the products they sell are tainted by illegal fishing or human rights abuses.
When this seafood reaches land, it often goes through processing plants in China using Uyghur labor. In the past decade, the Chinese government has been forcibly relocating tens of thousands of Uyghur workers, loading them onto trains, planes and buses under tight security, and sending them to seafood processing plants on the other side of the country in Shandong province, a fishing hub along the eastern coast. In 2022, the U.N. said that Chinese government documents indicated coercion was used to place Uyghur “surplus laborers” into transfer programs. In the same year, the International Labor Organization expressed “deep concern” over China’s labor policies in Xinjiang, noting that coercion was built-in to the regulatory and policy framework for labor transfers.
By searching company newsletters, annual reports, state media stories, and Chinese social media, the investigation found that in the past five years, more than a thousand Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been sent to work in at least ten seafood processing plants.
The Chinese government also bolsters its seafood industry with workers from North Korea, primarily in processing plants in the border province of Liaoning, located in northeast China. The North Korean government has, for the past thirty years, sent citizens to work in factories in Russia and China and made them put up to ninety per cent of their earnings—amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars per year—into accounts controlled by the government. As of November 2022, more than 80,000 North Koreans were employed in Chinese border cities, including hundreds in seafood plants. Videos from the Chinese social media app Douyin show North Korean female workers in seafood factories as recently as November 2022 in Dandong and Donggang.
***
The Zhen Fa 7 began its journey on August 29, 2019, when it left the port of Shidao, in China’s Shandong province, and sailed to the port of Busan, South Korea, to pick up its Indonesian crew.
It was a festive time. The final week of August marks the start of the autumn fishing season in China and sees more than 20,000 ships launch each year. Amid fireworks and drum-playing, villagers in Shidao hung red flags on fishing boats to celebrate hopes for a hearty haul. Three days after the Zhen Fa 7 launched, a headline in a provincial newspaper declared, “Open the sea! Let's open our appetite and eat seafood.”
Daniel Aritonang had worked hard to secure himself a position on board. After graduating from high school, in 2018, he had struggled to find work. The rate of unemployment in Indonesia was high: over 5.5 percent nationally, and more than 16 percent for youth. So, when Anhar, a local friend, suggested that the two of them go abroad together on a fishing boat, Aritonang agreed. Friends and family were surprised at his decision, because the demands of the job were so high and the pay so low. But a job was a job, and both he and Anhar desperately needed one. “On land, they ask for my skill.” Anhar said, recalling why he decided to go to sea. “To be honest, I don’t have any.”
In the summer of 2019, Aritonang and Anhar contacted PT Bahtera Agung Samudra, a “manning” agency based in Central Java. In the maritime world, manning agencies recruit and supply workers to fishing ships, handling everything from paychecks, work contracts, and plane tickets to port fees and processing visas. They are poorly regulated, frequently abusive, and have been connected to human trafficking. On July 5, 2019, following the agency’s instructions, Aritonang and Anhar took a boat to Java and then made their way to Tegal. There they took a medical exam and handed over their passports and bank documents, along with several headshots and copies of their birth certificates. (PT Bahtera does not have a license to operate, according to government records, and did not respond to requests for comment.)
For the next two months, they waited in Tegal to hear if they got the job. Money ran short. Through Facebook messenger, Aritonang wrote to his friend Firmandes Nugraha, asking for help to pay for food. Nugraha urged him to return home. “You don’t even know how to swim,” Nugraha reminded him. Eventually assignments came through, and, on Sept. 1, Aritonang appeared in a Facebook photo with other Indonesians waiting in Busan to board their fishing vessels. “Just a bunch of not high ranking people who want to be successful by having a bright future,” said Aritonang.
That day, Aritonang and Anhar boarded the Zhen Fa 7, and the ship set sail across the Pacific. They numbered 30 men: 20 from China, and the remaining 10 from Indonesia.
***
For most of the 20th century, distant-water fishing was dominated by three countries: the Soviet Union, Japan, and Spain. These fleets shrank in size after the Soviet collapse, and as labor and environmental standards made fishing more costly. But during this period, China invested billions of dollars in its fleet and took advantage of new technologies to muscle in on a very lucrative industry. China has also attempted to fortify its autonomy by building its own processing plants, cold-storage facilities and fishing ports overseas.
Those efforts succeeded beyond any predictions. China has now become the world’s undisputed seafood superpower. In 1988 it caught 198 million pounds of seafood; in 2020, it caught 5 billion. No other country comes close.
For China, the vast armada has great value that extends beyond just maintaining its status as a seafood superpower. It also helps the country create jobs, make money, and feed its population. Abroad, the fleet helps the country forge new trade routes, flex political muscle, press territorial claims, and increase China’s political influence in the developing world.
Political analysts, particularly in the West, say that having just one country controlling a global resource as valuable as seafood creates a precarious power imbalance. Navy analysts and ocean conservationists also fear that China is expanding its maritime reach in ways that are undermining global food security, eroding international law, and heightening military tensions.
“Plenty of countries are engaging in destructive fishing practices but China is distinct because of the size of its fleet and because it uses the fleet for geopolitical ambitions,” said Ian Ralby, CEO of I.R. Consilium, a global consultancy that concentrates on maritime security. “No one else has the same level of state ownership in this industry, no one else has a law that obligates their fishing ships to actively gather and hand over intelligence to the government and no one else is as actively invading other countries’ waters.”
According to Greg Poling, a senior fellow at Center for Strategic and International Studies, there’s another wrinkle in all of this: Not all Chinese fishing vessels actually fish. Instead, hundreds of them serve as a kind of civilian militia that works to press territorial claims against other nations. Many of those claims concern seafloor oil and gas reserves. Taking ownership of the South China Sea is part of the same project for the Chinese as taking control of Hong Kong and Taiwan. The goal is to reclaim “lost” territory and restore China’s former glory.
China’s dominance has come at a moment when the world’s hunger for products from the sea has never been greater. Seafood is the world’s last major source of wild protein and an existentially important form of sustenance for much of the planet. During the past 50 years, global seafood consumption has risen more than fivefold, and the industry, led by China, has satisfied that appetite through technological advances in refrigeration, engine efficiency, hull strength, and radar. Satellite navigation has also revolutionized how long fishing vessels can stay at sea, and the distances they travel.
Industrial fishing has now advanced technologically so much that it has become less an art than a science, more a harvest than a hunt. To compete requires knowledge and huge reserves of capital, which Japan and European countries have in recent decades been unable to provide. But China has had both, along with a fierce will to compete and win.
China has grown the size of its fleet predominantly through state subsidies, which by 2018 had reached $7 billion annually, making it the world’s largest provider of fishing subsidies. The vast majority of that investment went toward expenses such as fuel and the cost of new boats. Ocean researchers consider these subsidies harmful, because they expand the size or efficiency of fishing fleets, which further deplete already diminished fish stocks.
The Chinese government’s support of its fleet is vital. Enric Sala, the director of National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project, said that more than half of the fishing that occurs on the high seas globally would be unprofitable without these subsidies, and squid jigging is the least profitable of all types of high-seas fishing.
China also bolsters its fleet with logistical, security, and intelligence support. For example, it sends vessels updates on the size and location of the world’s major squid colonies, allowing them to work in a coordinated manner.
In July of 2022, a reporter watched an armada of about 260 Chinese squid ships jigging a patch of sea west of the Galapagos Islands. The group suddenly pulled up anchors, in near simultaneity, and moved a hundred miles to the southeast. “This kind of coordination is atypical,” Ted Schmitt, the director of Skylight, a maritime-monitoring program, told me. “Fishing vessels from most other countries wouldn’t work together on this scale.”
***
During the past four years, a team of reporters conducted a broad investigation of working conditions, human-rights abuses, and environmental crimes in the world’s seafood supply chain. Because the Chinese distant-water fishing fleet is so large, so widely dispersed, and so notoriously brutal, the investigation centered on this fleet. The reporters interviewed captains and boarded ships in the South Pacific Ocean, near the Galapagos Islands; in the South Atlantic Ocean, near the Malvinas Islands; in the Atlantic Ocean, near Gambia; and in the Sea of Japan, near Korea.
The visits to these ships revealed in stark detail a broad pattern of human rights and labor abuses, including debt bondage, wage withholding, excessive working hours, beatings of deckhands, passport confiscation, prohibiting timely access to medical care, and deaths from violence. Workdays on many Chinese open-water fishing vessels routinely last 15 hours, six days a week. Crew quarters are cramped. Injuries, malnutrition, illness, and beatings are common.
One of these trips, facilitated in February 2022 by Sea Shepherd, an ocean-conservation group, included an invitation to board a Chinese squid-fishing ship near the Malvinas Islands. The captain of the vessel granted reporters permission to roam freely as long as they did not name his vessel.
Whenever squid ships are fishing, the heaviest labor happens at night. The ships are festooned with hundreds of bowling-ball-sized light bulbs, which hang on racks on both sides of the vessel and are used to lure squid up from the depths.
As squid are hauled in, the scene on deck often looks like a brightly lit auto-body shop where an oil change has gone terribly wrong. When pulled onboard, squid squirt purplish black ink. Warm and viscous, the ink coagulates within minutes and coats all surfaces with a slippery mucus-like ooze. Because deep-sea squid have high levels of ammonia in their tissue, for buoyancy, the air on board smells powerfully like urine.
The mood on board felt like that of a watery purgatory. The ship had about 50 “jigs” hanging off each side, each operated by an automatic reel. Crew members stationed around the deck were responsible for monitoring two or three reels at a time, to ensure that they didn’t jam. The men’s teeth were yellowed from chain smoking, their skin a sickly sallow, their hands torn and spongy from sharp gear and perpetual wetness.
Two Chinese deckhands wearing bright orange life vests stood on deck babysitting the automatic reels. One man was twenty-eight, the other eighteen. It was their first time at sea, and they had signed two-year contracts. They earned about ten thousand dollars a year, but, if they missed a day of work for sickness or injury, they were docked three days’ pay. The older deckhand recounted watching a crew member’s arm get broken by a weight from the jig that swung wildly. The captain stayed on the bridge, but another officer shadowed one of the reporters wherever he went. At one point, the officer was called away, and the younger deckhand ducked into a dark hallway to whisper his plea for help.
“Our passports were taken,” he said to the visiting reporter. “They won’t give them back.”
Instead of speaking more, he began typing on his cell phone, for fear of being overheard. “Can you take us to the embassy in Argentina?”
“I can’t disclose too much right now given I still need to work on the vessel if I give too much information it might potentially create issues onboard,” he wrote. “Please contact my family,” he said, before abruptly ending the conversation when the minder returned.
Stories of deckhands held captive on these vessels continue to surface: More recently, in June 2023, a bottle washed on shore a beach in Maldonado, Uruguay, with a message inside from a distressed deckhand on another Chinese squidder: “Hello, I am a crew member of the ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 765, and I was locked up by the company. When you see this paper, please help me call the police! S.O.S. S.O.S.” (The owner of the ship, Qingdao Songhai Fishery, said that the claims were fabricated by crewmembers.)
***
Aritonang fell severely ill in late January 2021. The whites of his eyes turned yellow, his legs and feet grew swollen and achy, and he lost his appetite and ability to walk. In all likelihood, he was suffering from a disease known as beriberi, caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1, also known as thiamine. Sometimes called “rice disease,” beriberi has historically broken out on ships and in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps—anywhere that diets have consisted mainly of polished or white rice or wheat flour, both poor sources of thiamine. When beriberi happens on ships, it is considered a possible indicator of criminal neglect because it is slow-acting, treatable and reversible, according to forensic pathologists.
The other Indonesians on board begged the captain to get Aritonang onshore medical attention, but the captain refused. Later, when asked to explain the captain’s refusal, Anhar, Aritonang’s friend and fellow crewmate, said, “There was still a lot of squid. We were in the middle of an operation.”
By February, Aritonang could no longer stand. He moaned in pain, slipping in and out of consciousness. Incensed, the Indonesian crew threatened to strike. “We were all against the captain,” Anhar recounted. The captain finally acquiesced on March 2 and had Aritonang transferred to a nearby fuel tanker called the Marlin, whose crew six days later dumped him off in Montevideo.
But by then it was too late. For several hours, the emergency room doctors struggled to keep him alive, while Reyes, the Bahasa translator, waited anxiously in the hall. Eventually they emerged from the emergency room to tell her that he had died.
A day later, the local coroner conducted an autopsy. “A situation of physical abuse emerged,” it reads. Nicolas Potrie, who runs the Indonesian consulate in the city, recalls getting a call from Mirta Morales, the prosecutor who investigated Aritonang’s case, who told him, “We need to continue trying to figure out what happened. These marks—everybody saw them.” Morales declined to say whether the investigation was closed but added that, as with most crimes at sea, she had very little information to work with.On April 22, Aritonang’s body was flown from Montevideo to Jakarta, then driven to his family home in the countryside, where a solemn crowd of villagers lined the road to pay their respects. The family opted not to open the coffin.
A funeral was held the next day, and Aritonang was buried a few feet from his father in a cemetery plot not far from his church, near the side of a road. His grave marker consisted of two slats of wood joined to make a cross. That night, an official from Aritonang’s manning agency visited the family at their home to discuss a “peace agreement.” Anhar said that the family ended up accepting a settlement of 200 million rupiah, or roughly $13,000. The family was reluctant to talk about the events on the ship. Aritonang’s brother Beben said that he didn’t want his family to get in trouble, and that talking about the case might cause problems for his mother. “We, Daniel's family,” he said, “have made peace with the ship people and have let him go.”
More than 9,000 miles away, the Zhen Fa 7 soon began its long journey home. In May 2021, it reached Singapore, where it disembarked its remaining Indonesian crew, who had not stepped on land for nearly two years. The ship then at last returned to Shandong where it unloaded 330 tons of squid, marked in port records as destined for export.
In an email, the Zhen Fa 7’s owner, Rongcheng Wangdao Deep-Sea Aquatic Products, declined to comment on Aritonang’s death but said that the company had found no evidence of misconduct on the ship: “There was nothing regarding your alleged appalling incidents about abuse, violation, insults to one’s character, physical violence or withheld salaries.” The company added that it had handed the matter over to the China Overseas Fisheries Association, which regulates the industry. Questions submitted to that agency went unanswered.
On April 10, 2022, a year after Aritonang’s death, his mother, Sihombing, sat on a leopard-print rug in her living room with Leonardo, her other son. Sihombing apologized that it had no furniture, and no place other than the floor to sit. The house underwent repairs, using money from the settlement, according to the village chief; in the end, Aritonang had managed to fix up his parents’ house after all. Asked about Daniel, Sihombing began to weep. “You can see how I am now,” she said.
“Don't be sad,” Leonardo said, patiently trying to console his mother. “It was his time.”
This story was produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization in Washington, D.C. Reporting and writing was contributed by Ian Urbina, Joe Galvin, Maya Martin, Susan Ryan, Daniel Murphy and Austin Brush.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
Water Cannons and "Boxing": Chinese Flotilla Tries to Block Convoy
The Philippine Coast Guard is used to encountering resistance from Chinese maritime forces at Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippine military maintains a small outpost, but the latest resupply run was more challenging than ever. 38 China Coast Guard, PLA Navy and Chinese maritime militia vessels - a new record - were anchored around the reef or under way nearby, and more than half a dozen shadowed the convoy in an attempt to harass it. One of the Chinese cutters also used its water cannon to intimidate the Philippine vessels.
At about 0630 hours on Friday, the PCG cutters BRP Cabra, Sindangan, and Melchora Aquino arrived in waters just off the shoal with two small supply boats in tow. The outpost is in a shallow lagoon, and larger ships can't access it, so the Philippine military charters small indigenous boats for the run. They encountered a substantial Chinese force, but with carefully planned maneuvering, they evaded it and completed the supply mission without risk of collision.
The PCG records its interactions with China's maritime "gray-zone" vessels at the shoal, and it usually brings embedded reporters to document the encounters. Videos the PCG released on Saturday appear to show a China Coast Guard cutter (CCG 5203, familiar from previous confrontations) using a high-capacity water cannon to intimidate a nearby Philippine supply boat. The cutter appeared to keep a distance of several hundred meters from the smaller vessel.
Another video shows four Chinese vessels - one cutter and three extra-large trawlers of the Chinese maritime militia - circling a single Philippine Coast Guard cutter, BRP Cabra. A third recording shows a slow-motion race to the reef, with five large Chinese vessels "boxing in" a small Philippine supply boat.
Despite the pressure from Chinese ships, the PCG cutters got closer to the channel entrance into the shoal's lagoon than they ever have before, the service told Rappler. The PCG deployed RIB boats to escort the supply vessels for the final mile to their destination, the grounded WWII landing ship BRP Sierra Madre, which has served as a makeshift base and a marker of sovereignty for the last 24 years.
"The dangerous maneuverings of the CCG vessels are illegal and irresponsible actions that put into question and significant doubt their narrative of law enforcement and their real identity as a coast guard organization,” said Philippines Coast Guard (PCG) commandant Admiral Ronnie Gavan in a statement. “Ironically, they are supposed to ensure safety of life at sea, but they are the one that deliberately violate [COLREGS]."
Chinese forces only contest the Philippines' access to Second Thomas Shoal, PCG personnel told reporters during the mission. The Philippines has other bases in the Spratly Islands, but these are never subjected to quasi-military blockade, at least not to the same degree.
China's military has protested the Philippine presence at the land feature since at least 1999, when the BRP Sierra Madre was run aground to defend against China's sweeping maritime claims. Over the past decade, Chinese dredging and construction companies have built a string of military bases on nearby atolls, covering over similar low-tide elevations with sand in order to build strategic runways, radar installations and city-sized complexes to house large garrisons.
Sunday, November 12, 2023
Millions of Indians set Diwali world record as air pollution worries rise
Homes decked with lights as annual Hindu festival celebrated across country
Devotees light earthen lamps on the banks of the Saryu river in Ayodhya on Saturday. AFP
AP Nov 12, 2023
Millions of Indians celebrated Diwali on Sunday, setting a Guinness World Record for the number of bright earthen oil lamps, as concerns about air pollution soared in the country.
Across the country, dazzling multi-colored lights decked homes and streets as devotees celebrated the annual Hindu festival of light symbolizing the victory of light over darkness.
At dusk on Saturday, devotees lit more than 2.22 million lamps and kept them burning for 45 minutes as religious hymns filled the air at the banks of the river, setting a new world record. Last year, more than 1.5 million earthen lamps were lit.
After counting the lamps, Guinness World Records representatives presented a certificate to Uttar Pradesh state’s top elected official, Yogi Adityanath.
More than 24,000 volunteers, mostly college students, helped prepare for the new record, said Pratibha Goyal, vice chancellor of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Avadh University in Ayodhya.
Diwali, a national holiday across India, is celebrated by socialising and exchanging gifts with family and friends. Many light earthen oil lamps or candles as fireworks are set off as part of the celebrations.
A Hindu woman holds a clay lamp during a ceremony to celebrate Diwali at Krishna temple in Lahore, Pakistan, on Sunday. AP
In the evening, a prayer is dedicated to the Hindu deity Lakshmi, who is believed to bring luck and prosperity.
Over the weekend, authorities ran extra trains to accommodate the huge numbers trying to reach their home towns to join in family celebrations.
Air quality concerns
The festival came amid rising worries about air quality in India.
A “hazardous” 400-500 level was recorded on the air quality index last week, more than 10 times the global safety threshold, which can cause acute and chronic bronchitis and asthma attacks.
But on Saturday, unexpected rain and a strong wind improved the levels to 220, according to the government-run Central Pollution Control Board.
Fireworks light up the night sky in Mumbai on Sunday. AFP
Air pollution levels are expected to soar again after the celebrations end on Sunday night because of the fireworks used.
Last week, officials in New Delhi shut down primary schools and banned polluting vehicles and construction work in an attempt to reduce the worst haze and smog of the season, which has posed respiratory problems for people and enveloped monuments and high-rise buildings in and around India’s capital.
Authorities used water sprinklers and anti-smog guns to control the haze and many people used masks to escape the air pollution.
Almost every year, New Delhi is named as India's city with the worst air quality, particularly in the winter, when the burning of crop residues in neighbouring states coincides with cooler temperatures that trap deadly smoke.
Some Indian states have banned the sale of fireworks and imposed other restrictions to stem the pollution. Authorities have also urged residents to light “green crackers” that emit less pollutants than normal fireworks. But similar bans have often been disregarded in the past.
This year's Diwali celebrations took place as authorities prepared for the January opening of a temple to Rama at former the site of the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya.
The mosque was destroyed by a Hindu mob with pickaxes and crowbars in December 1992, sparking violence between Hindus and Muslims that left about 2,000 people dead, most of them Muslims. The Supreme Court’s verdict in 2019 allowed a temple to be built in place of the demolished mosque.
Smoke clouds Indian capital on Diwali as revellers defy firecracker ban
Revellers lighting firecrackers on the night of Deepavali in New Delhi on Nov 12
. PHOTO: AFP
NEW DELHI – A toxic haze began to circulate in New Delhi on Sunday as people in the city of 20 million, which has struggled with heavy pollution recently, defied a ban on firecrackers on the night of Diwali, the annual Hindu festival of light.
Smoke plumes were visible across the sky as revellers let off firecrackers in the evening to mark the country’s biggest festival.
Every year government authorities or India’s Supreme Court impose bans on firecrackers – but only rarely do those bans appear to be enforced.
The Air Quality Index (AQI) across all 40 monitoring stations in the capital averaged 219 on a scale of 500, according to the federal pollution control board data, indicating “poor” conditions that can affect most people on prolonged exposure.
The AQI data also showed that the concentration of PM2.5 poisonous particulate matter was around 100 microgrammes per cubic m of air – 20 times higher than the World Health Organisation’s recommended maximum.
Globally, air pollution was the worst in India’s eastern city of Kolkata, while Delhi was the fifth-most polluted, according to Swiss group IQAir.
Doctors say the air quality is likely to worsen on Monday as smoke from firecrackers lingers in the air, potentially causing itchy eyes and irritation in the throat.
“I can see my patients are getting distressed. As a society, we have not understood the value of clean air,” said senior consultant Desh Deepak at Delhi’s Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital.
Some Hindus resent the Diwali firecracker bans, which they see as an attempt to interfere with their observing their religious festivals.
Earlier in the day, Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai had urged citizens to steer clear of firecrackers to prevent citizens from having breathing problems later.
Just before the weekend, a spell of rain had brought some relief to the city, where the AQI dipped below 160 after hovering around the 400-500 level over the past week.
The world’s most polluted capital typically experiences heavy smog in the winter months as particulate matter gets trapped in the cold air, leading to spikes in cases of respiratory distress.
The real worry for the country should be the high baseline AQI of around 200-250 in almost all major Indian cities.
A thick smog blankets the capital city of Delhi, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. Air pollution level is Delhi-NCR has started rising owing much to stubble (parali) burning in adjoining states. Image Courtesy: PTI Photo/Arun Sharma
So here we are once again, regular like the seasons, with Delhi and the entire Indo-Gangetic plains right down to West Bengal, shrouded in a grey haze of pollutants as visible in photographs from space. As many as 13 of the world’s 20 worst polluted cities or towns in the world are in India, including Delhi, satellite towns and other urban centres in northern and eastern India. This has now become such a hardy and recurrent annual feature that it may as well be declared yet another festival of which we already have so many in this country.
As with other Indian festivals, this one too has by now acquired ritual trappings. The press carries daily articles on different aspects, but really only provides snippets of information with little or no meaningful analysis leading to effective policies. The media discourse has utterly confused the issues, and obscured the basic causes behind high levels of air pollution and its major sources, thereby preventing a clear understanding of the problem and a focused policy direction for a long-term and permanent solution.
The same holds true for establishment political parties. The Union government and the ruling dispensation, which daily clamour for control over the administration of Delhi, now only maintains a studious silence, leaving things to a committee and to the different states, while taking pot-shots at Opposition-rules states.
The Delhi government and its ruling party, which used to cry hoarse against the neighbouring states, especially Punjab and Haryana formerly governed by the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party, respectively, now only speaks against pollutants coming from Haryana, obviously because Punjab is now ruled by the Aam Aadmi Party!
Even the august Supreme Court, which often shies away from important decisions which it says may cross the line separating it from executive or legislative jurisdictions, now questions the basis for different executive decisions, but then proceeds to itself pass orders directing this or that policy or executive action, which too have no basis in science or empirical evidence!
Marx said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and the next time as farce. But what does one say when a sorry history repeats itself annually?
THE BASICS OF AIR POLLUTION IN DELHI (AND OTHER INDIAN CITIES)
Let us first get to a basic understanding of the problem of air pollution in urban centres in India.
There is much talk of seasonal or other variations, weather conditions, wind flows, seasonal or other spurts in one or another pollution source, but not clearly identifying the major sources of pollution. Extensive discussions about farm fires in north-western states, the inversion phenomenon in winter wherein cold air stays close to the ground gets trapped, make it appear as if the problem is more acute in North India than in peninsular and southern India. In major coastal cities such as in Mumbai, Chennai and even to some extent Kolkata, sea-breezes regularly flush out air pollutants over these cities, ensuring lower ambient pollution and beguilingly low air quality indices.
It needs to be clearly understood that total pollutants released into the air, especially over cities, come from specific sources in quantities that can be determined by scientific studies and models. The major sources of air pollution in any urban centre in India would mostly comprise vehicle exhaust, coal-fired power plants in the vicinity, brick and other kilns in the region, construction and ambient dust, domestic, industrial or commercial burning of solid fuels such as coal and firewood, open burning of garbage or waste, industrial air pollution including and especially from burning of highly polluting fuels such as rubber and poor grades of furnace oil etc in boilers or other equipment, diesel generators and some other sources.
Of all these, as numerous studies have shown, vehicular pollution, construction and ambient dust, and industrial pollution are the major sources which account for most of the baseline or uniform, underlying air pollution in almost all Indian cities.
The main point here, however, is that, besides these variations and seasonal factors, a finite and determinate quantity of pollutants are emitted from these sources in or near any given city. Out of this total quantity of pollutants, some will stay over these urban centres and their surrounding areas, and some will be blown away or otherwise diffuse through the air due to seasonal and daily variations including rainfall, winds, summer and winter etc.
The Air Quality Index (AQI) is a measure of pollutants determined by sensors placed at different points in the city, and often cited and used to categorise conditions as “good,” “poor” or “severe.” AQI is a good indicator of air pollution under current conditions including as influenced by seasonal and weather patterns, and can help guide additional seasonal or other variable responses. But we need to look closer at the main, or baseline, total air pollutants emitted in and around the city in order to determine, plan and implement long-term strategies to curb air pollution on a permanent basis.
So, if one looks at the numbers, Delhi, surrounding National Capital Region or NCR and other Indo-Gangetic belt cities are being driven to panic by AQI numbers of close to 500 due to seasonal spikes in farm fires and winter conditions. While farm fires etc. can be tackled, the real worry should be the high baseline AQI of around 200-250 in almost all major Indian cities.
KNEE-JERK REACTIONS, FALSE SOLUTIONS This is certainly not what is being done, or even being addressed, in any city in India or in the country as a whole.
There is a National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) in existence which aims at a 20-30% reduction of PM 2.5 and PM 10 (particulate matter of 2.5 or 10 microns or thousandths of a millimetre size), of which the former is particularly dangerous since it can easily penetrate into the lungs and cause serious respiratory diseases, as compared to 2017 levels. The needle has barely moved on these indicators, and funds have mostly been spent only on providing sensors to different cities. No strategy as such is visible, and no effective inter-departmental coordination mechanism has been set up.
Instead, what the country is witnessing is panic-driven knee-jerk reactions and false solutions offered by all and sundry without any scientific basis or evidence-based reasoning based, among other things, on valuable experiences of other countries which have successfully tackled air pollution in cities over decades resulting in steady and continuing low air pollution today. We shall learn about these in the next section.
In the current tragi-comedy in Delhi, there is first the over-concentration on farm fires in Punjab and Haryana, which have been discussed ad nauseam, including in these columns. Stubble burning is, of course, worrying, but the problem is not amenable to short-being caught between high costs and the urgent need to clear fields of straw to enable planting of winter wheat within an extremely short window of two-three weeks. Various interventions of providing machines and subsidies to various user industries have indeed shown some results, but not enough.
The Centre's Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) has reported a substantial decrease in stubble-burning incidents in Punjab and Haryana between September 15 to October 29, of around 56% and 40%, respectively, compared with the same period last year. Yet, as harvest time neared, this has risen again and spiked.
Clearly, more holistic, end-to-end solutions, which cannot simply be left to market forces, are required by state governments with pro-active support and coordination by the Centre. It is pointless for the Supreme Court to peremptorily order the state governments concerned to ensure that all farm fires should be stopped forthwith, as it did earlier this week.
Besides this, the Delhi government decided to introduce its vehicle-rationing “odd-even” (now deferred) scheme under which vehicles with number plates ending with odd or even numbers would ply only on alternative days. The Supreme Court sneered at this idea, asked for evidence to prove that such a scheme works, and sharply called it “sheer optics''. But surely, in theory, a scheme which reduces vehicles on Delhi’s roads by half would cause a substantial dent in air pollution. This was clearly evidenced during the pandemic lockdown when, due to lack of vehicular movement, air quality in Indian cities was better than it had been in several decades!
International experience in Mexico, China and Brazil has shown that such schemes to reduce numbers of vehicles on the roads do indeed work, but have been thwarted to cunning vehicle-owner dissenting response of buying additional vehicles with different number plates to circumvent the “odd-even” norms. In Delhi, two-wheelers which account for 7 million vehicles, have been exempted!
At the same time, the SC asked the Delhi government to consider banning app-based taxis, with the latter then proposing to stop out-of-state taxis from entering Delhi. This would only curb a tiny fraction of the one million vehicles on Delhi’s roads! What evidence does the august court have that this scheme would work?
The same applies to the infamous “smog towers” which the Supreme Court ordered to be installed in 2020 despite evidence-based reluctance of various agencies and academic institutions. Yet, in the past few days, the SC ordered the by now dysfunctional smog towers in Connaught Place to be restarted, even though studies have shown that the tower is effective only over a few tens of metres.
And now the Delhi government is preparing for cloud seeding to produce rain!
More pipedreams. INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE In sharp contrast to India, Europe as a whole has substantially improved its air quality over the past two decades by concerted and holistic efforts, including strict enforcement of high standards for industrial, vehicular and domestic air pollution by cooking and heating fuels especially coal. These measures have been backed by EU and national legislation, national commitments with strict timelines, and a comprehensive approach tackling all sources of pollution and all major pollutants.
As a result, more than half of EU countries, mostly in Western Europe, have brought down average PM 2.5 levels to under the EU standard of 25 micrograms per cubic metre, compared with the India average of well over 100, and aim to achieve the WHO (World Health Organisation) standard of matter, especially PM 2.5.
The EU has also sharply focused on the dangerous nitrogen dioxide emanating mainly from vehicles and thermal power plants, on surface level ozone, a major carcinogen, and on toxic carbon monoxide, which hardly find mention in the discourse in India. Having earlier tackled power generation and polluting industries, most present efforts are aimed at vehicular pollution.
Another outstanding example is Beijing, widely studied and appreciated by UN agencies and other international agencies. About a decade or two ago, Beijing had the dubious distinction of consistently ranked the most polluted city in the world, with PM 2.5 well in excess of 100. Its smog was notorious, driving many multinational companies and diplomatic missions to seriously consider and publicly speak about relocating out of Beijing.
Even though China as a whole ranked quite poorly in international pollution rankings, it put in highly focused and major efforts into tackling air pollution in Beijing. It moved all coal-based power plants and industries out of the city, ensured phasing out of older and more polluting vehicles, and introduced low-emission zones in the city where only the cleanest or electric vehicles were allowed, an idea also enforced in London and other European cities.
Beijing has been transformed from a car-centred city to what agencies have described as an example of sustainable mobility, expanding urban rail, bicycle and pedestrian mobility. A major afforestation effort was also taken in the northern regions from where recurring dust-storms bringing fine dust into Beijing were curbed.
Widespread use of domestic coal-burning stoves was also curbed. As a result of all these measures, Beijing’s air pollution levels have been reduced by almost half its earlier levels, also bringing down pollution in the huge extended tri-city “megapolis” area.
There is no reason at all why India cannot emulate these international examples. But this would call for political will, planning and enforcement… and stop tilting at windmills!
The writer is with the Delhi Science Forum and All India People’s Science Network. The views are personal.
Killer Delhi Air Reminds, Pollution Needs National Solution
Experts say air pollution needs a regional approach, not finger-pointing, and certainly not complete neglect.
Commuters cross railway tracks amid low visibility due to smog, in Gurugram, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023. Image Courtesy: PTI
Delhi’s air quality worsens every Diwali season, and this year is no exception. The rainfall in parts of the National Capital Region (NCR) brings some relief, but will hardly change things unless the rainfall is widespread and prolonged—which will have other negative consequences for the economy and people. Hence, Delhi and its surroundings, with the air quality index hitting 500, 100 times above what the World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed healthy, needs to be part of a national solution for the pollution crisis.
The 3.3 crore people living in the NCR are only too aware that the cold-weather smog sees the PM2.5 levels register a dangerous 100% increase, piercing the lungs of citizens and precipitating a host of diseases. On November 2 alone, they recorded a 68% increase in 24 hours. Similar statistics emerged from around the country, making people worried about what miseries the expected spike in pollution with Diwali cracker-burning will bring.
The weary citizens, and especially the elderly and young of this mega city, are asking why the central and state governments, including those of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, have failed to get together and draw up a game-plan that will resolve this annual catastrophe that afflicts all? They know that blaming seasonal factors like crop-residue burning and festival-related pollution is not the answer.
However, the seriousness of this matter seems lost on our decision-makers. A few years ago, Dr Arvind Kumar, who headed the Lung Care Foundation at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, recreated a pair of large human lungs with the help of HEPA (High-efficiency Particulate Air) filters, which are used to trap dust in operation theatres. These “lungs’ were designed to mimic the workings of a pair of human lungs. Dr Kumar had expected the lungs to become dark (signifying high pollution) over time, but they started to darken in just one day and went utterly dark within six days. Dr Kumar said, speaking not only about the effects of pollution in the capital and the entire country, “There are no non-smokers left in India. We have become a nation of smokers.”
The point Dr Kumar was trying to make was that in Delhi, to cite an example, the PM 2.5 levels are high around the year, with doctors insisting this toxic air is the equivalent of smoking over ten cigarettes a day, even for newborn children. With air pollution levels having risen alarmingly across all the major cities of the Indo-Gangetic plain, the situation has become alarming throughout the country.
“This is a failure on the part of individuals, officials, organisations to take cognisance of the fact that breathing is killing [us],” he said in a widely-circulated interview.
Dr Piyush Ranjan from the Department of Medicine AIIMS recently warned, “Air pollution affects various systems of the body apart from causing respiratory diseases. Pollution has direct relations with coronary artery diseases like heart attack, brain stroke and arthritis, and there is scientific evidence to show its relationship with different types of cancer.”
Delhi has set up a Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM), a statutory body responsible for strategies to combat pollution. It has prepared a graded response plan, and the Grade 4 response has kicked in under the present circumstances. The CAQM has banned diesel BS-4 and all BS-3 private cars and banned diesel-run medium goods vehicles and heavy goods vehicles in the city. But despite a ban on construction activities and the closure of schools until November 26, the ambient air quality has not improved. This is because the root of the problem is not being addressed.
The political class does a great deal of name-calling, with each blaming this mess on the rival party. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress are pointing fingers at the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi, blaming it for the present situation given that farm fires are spiking in Punjab. Indeed, reports of these fires continue to come in despite the Supreme Court ordering the Punjab and Haryana governments to ensure farmers stop burning stubble in their fields.
Can AAP escape blame for the crisis in Delhi? According to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party has failed to provide alternatives to the farmers, resulting in farm fires. Priyanka Kakkar, a party spokesperson, defended her party and called the criticism baseless as she believes Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has taken steps to clear Delhi’s air. This includes introducing electric buses, stopping waste burning, and ensuring all industries run on CNG.
According to Kakkar, there were 81,000 farm fires in Punjab in 2016 and only 19,000 in 2023. However, this is contradicted by NASA figures, which paint a very different picture.
She says ensuring 24x7 electricity supply reduced diesel generator use in the capital, unlike Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, where power cuts force industry and housing societies to use diesel generators.
Herein lies the crux of the problem. While there is no doubt that the farm fires helped accelerate the crisis, several neighbouring cities including Ghaziabad, NOIDA, Greater NOIDA and Faridabad report highly hazardous air. According to the Central Pollution Control Board data for the first week of November, Greater NOIDA has the dubious distinction of being the country’s most polluted city. Meanwhile, last year, the World Air Quality Report ranked Delhi the fourth most polluted of 50 cities in the world. This year, Delhi is in an equally bad, if not worse, situation.
How, then, should our planners bring about a turnaround? How should PM 2.5 levels be immediately reduced by 60% to meet the National Ambient Air Quality standards? For one, they must recognise the different sources causing 24/7 pollution around the year. However, the government must also ensure a significant transition from private vehicles to public transport use. In New York and London, exorbitant parking fees have made even the wealthy feel the pinch of driving personal cars and two-wheelers.
By contrast, 1.2 crore vehicles in Delhi were recorded as registered in 2020, though this dipped in the following year. Still, the number of vehicles plying in Delhi on any day exceeds the registered vehicles figure because of cabs from neighbouring cities (which are banned now). Further, trucks and buses using BS 3 diesel supply essential commodities to the city. The government will have to introduce strict laws and restrictions to control private vehicles, but this will only work if there is efficient, reliable and inexpensive last-mile connectivity for public transport, especially the Delhi Metro and bus services.
By and large, industries in Delhi have switched to CNG, but the government needs to take adequate steps to ensure that CNG remains a viable option against the price of coal. If not, people will rely on coal, whatever the environmental consequences.
The other major problem in Delhi is waste management. The CPCB’s annual report for waste management in 2021 revealed that Delhi had the highest per-capita waste generation (450 grams per day), while 263 tonnes of solid waste was generated daily, which is unaccounted for. This is because a lot of trash has been outsourced to private players and is not handled by municipal corporations.
Delhi’s waste-to-energy plants also need to be more efficient. For every tonne of burnt waste, 300 kg of trash is dumped in landfills.
Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director of the Centre for Science and Environment, says, “The states and Centre need to act on a massive scale and with rapid speed to fill some glaring gaps in policy. They must realise that transportation remains the biggest polluter in Delhi, much more than farmers’ fires. The 1.2 crore vehicles plying in the capital add to the traffic congestion on the streets. The government needs to follow a regional approach to resolve this issue, a Delhi-centric approach alone will not work.”
Medical experts say that all sections of society, including politicians, religious leaders and others, must join hands. As Dr Kumar has said, he tried to engage with spiritual figures so they could tell followers what steps to take to curb pollution. Sadly, he claims, he met with little success.
The government continues to be one of the biggest polluters in the NCR, given the number of building projects being undertaken by the Centre. Dust and smoke remain two of the biggest polluters, which can only be curbed if all non-essential construction stops immediately.
Pollution is a deadly killer, and it is questionable how ‘slow’ it is in claiming victims, for India has had unacceptably poor air quality for well over a decade. Unfortunately, governments are blind to the consequences and the toll it has been taking on the country’s entire population.
The author is an independent journalist. The views are personal.
Delhi: Air Quality Severe Again; PM 2.5 at 30 to 40 Times Healthy Limit set by WHO
Smoke from post-harvest paddy straw burning in neighbouring states accounts for one-third of the air pollution in the national capital, say officials.
Representational Image. Image Courtesy: Flickr
New Delhi, Nov 8 (PTI) Air quality in Delhi and its suburbs dropped to the severe category again on Wednesday morning, with smoke from post-harvest paddy straw burning in neighbouring states accounting for one-third of the air pollution in the national capital.
The city's Air Quality Index (AQI) stood at 421, worsening from 395 at 4 p.m on Tuesday.
Despite a marginal dip, the concentration of PM2.5, fine particulate matter capable of penetrating deep into the respiratory system and triggering health problems, exceeded the government-prescribed safe limit of 60 micrograms per cubic metre by seven to eight times in the capital.
It was 30 to 40 times the healthy limit of 15 micrograms per cubic metre set by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Several cities across the Indo-Gangetic plains reported hazardous air quality. Neighbouring Ghaziabad (382), Gurugram (370), Noida (348), Greater Noida (474), and Faridabad (396) also reported hazardous air quality.
According to data from the Decision Support System, a numerical model-based framework capable of identifying sources of particulate matter pollution in Delhi, stubble burning in neighbouring states, especially Punjab and Haryana, accounted for 37% of the air pollution in Delhi on Tuesday. It is likely to be 33% on Wednesday.
The Delhi government on Monday announced the return of its flagship odd-even scheme after four years anticipating further deterioration of air quality post-Diwali.
The odd-even scheme, under which cars are allowed to operate on alternate days based on their odd or even number plates, will be implemented between November 13 and November 20. The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and Evidence for Policy Design had analysed the impact of the odd-even system in 2016 and found that Delhi saw a 14-16 per cent reduction in PM2.5 levels during the hours it remained in force in January that year. However, there was no reduction in pollution when the scheme was brought back in April that year.
To protect the health of school children, the government also decided to suspend in-person classes in all schools, except for students in grades X and XII preparing for board exams, until November 10.
According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences' Air Quality Early Warning System for Delhi-NCR, the region is likely to experience severe air quality for another five to six days.
Doctors say breathing in the polluted air of Delhi is equivalent to the harmful effects of smoking approximately 10 cigarettes a day.
Prolonged exposure to high levels of pollution can cause or exacerbate respiratory problems such as asthma, bronchitis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and can dramatically raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, said Rajesh Chawla, senior consultant in pulmonology and critical care at the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital.
Stringent restrictions mandated under the final stage of the Central government's air pollution control plan for Delhi-NCR, called the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), have also been implemented in Delhi.
The restrictions under stage IV of GRAP, including a ban on all kinds of construction work and the entry of polluting trucks into the capital, took effect on Sunday after air quality in the capital dropped to severe plus (AQI above 450) levels.
GRAP categorises actions into four stages: Stage I - Poor (AQI 201-300); Stage II - Very Poor (AQI 301-400); Stage III - Severe (AQI 401-450); and Stage IV - Severe Plus (AQI above 450).
Unfavourable meteorological conditions, combined with vehicular emissions, paddy straw burning, firecrackers, and other local pollution sources, contribute to hazardous air quality levels in Delhi-NCR during the winter every year.
According to a Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) analysis, the capital experiences peak pollution from November 1 to November 15 when the number of stubble-burning incidents in Punjab and Haryana increases.
Air quality in Delhi-NCR declined over the last two weeks due to a gradual drop in temperatures, calm winds that trap pollution, and a surge in post-harvest paddy straw burning across Punjab and Haryana.
Delhi's air quality ranks among the worst in the world's capital cities.
A report by EPIC in August said that air pollution is shortening lives by almost 12 years in Delhi.
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