And fixing it will be hard and costly
|SHIQIAO, HUNAN PROVINCE|13 min read
TANG DONGHUA, a wiry 47-year-old farmer wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt, smokes a cigarette and gesticulates towards his paddy fields in the hills of southern Hunan province. The leaves of his rice plants poke about a foot above water. Mr Tang says he expects to harvest about one tonne of rice from his plot of a third of a hectare (0.8 acres) near the small village of Shiqiao. There is just one problem: the crop will be poisoned.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “The bad earth”
From the June 10th 2017 edition
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