14 DAY TRIAL // This Monday, Wang Shiyuan, i.e. a Chinese government official, said that, according to recent investigations, roughly 3.33 million hectares (8 million acres) of the country's farmlands contain a tad too many pollutants to be safely used to grow crops, Reuters reports.
To put things into perspective, it must be said that this area is similar to Belgium's entire surface.
The pollutants that specialists are most concerned about are heavy metals. However, other waste present in these lands is also believed to constitute a threat to public health.
Some of the heavy metals found in these regions are estimated to date back to about one century ago. Specialists have also pinned down traces of pesticides whose use was outlawed back in the 1980s, the same source tells us.
Wang Shiyuan stresses that efforts are currently made to clean these lands and make them suitable for growing crops. To this end, the country's high officials are said to be willing to spend “tens of billions of yuan.”
For the time being, food security is an issue in China. Hence, plans to reserve 120 million hectares (295 million acres) of land for agriculture have been announced.