An official from the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) called last week for amending the current Environmental Protection Law.

The amendment is described not only as necessary but urgent to put a brake on the deterioration of environmental conditions nationwide.

The current law was enacted in 1989 and has not been revised since. It cannot deal with the realities of the present, as our economy has been growing rapidly to the detriment of the environment.

After an investigation into how this law has been enforced in 20 cities and regions, the SEPA has concluded that the law is badly in need of revision. In a survey the team conducted, 65 per cent of the 1,553 respondents believed that the current law cannot hold the leaders of local governments accountable for environmental protection, and 95 per cent insist that legal penalties for pollution must be explicitly imposed on government officials in the amended law.

The amendment needs to provide environmental watchdogs at various levels a position independent of their corresponding governments.

The current law stipulates that local environmental protection departments are under the dual leadership of both local governments and the SEPA. But the former have real power over the appointment of officials and manage the finance of such departments. This has led to a conflict of interest in the relationship. How can we expect local watchdogs to bite the hand that feeds them?

In North China's Shanxi Province, only 65 of 680 enterprises producing coke have permission from the local environmental protection watchdog and only 5 per cent of all these firms reach the State's required standard for discharge of sulphur dioxide. When these firms were allowed to operate by local governments, environmental watchdogs could do nothing about it.

The current law says that leaders of enterprises that have violated environmental rules in discharging pollutants should be given disciplinary punishments, which can be anything but a deterrent keeping them from committing the same offence again.

The SEPA started to establish supervision departments in charge of big regions under its direct leadership last month. But it is quite doubtful that such a mechanism would win battles against local protectionism without the backing of an explicit legal code.

Even if the SEPA's new efforts could get somewhere, they would hardly make any substantial progress because the administrative penalties and ceiling for fines stipulated in the current law are not severe enough.

Such bites without teeth have created an embarrassing situation, in which those firms that abide by rules and treat their pollutants before discharging them have spent much money on building and maintaining treatment facilities, while those that defy the rules benefit from sparing the expense.

This is one of the major reasons behind the ever-worsening environmental pollution nationwide.