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Green paychecks now

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-05 07:49

Promoting environmental protection by offering financial rewards is an innovative policy to check pollution in rural areas. The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), along with the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission, has issued a circular, giving details of how the plan would be implemented across the country.

But this is not the first time such an approach has been adopted in China. The Ningxia Hui autonomous region came up with a financial reward scheme to save the environment in 2006. The regional government extended monetary help to townships and counties, and even villages, which had effectively treated pollutants and maintained a tidy rural environment. The region has spent 250 million yuan ($36.51 million) in the past two years to save 3 million villagers from industrial and agricultural pollutants.

Late last year, the MEP turned it into a national scheme. Such a program had become necessary because an increasing number of polluting factories were shifted from the developed eastern and southern coastal areas to the less developed central and western zones in the past two years. The process is still on.

One example of how industrial pollution can wreak havoc in our lives was the drinking water contamination in Yancheng city in northern Anhui province late last month. Not surprisingly, the contamination was linked to effluents discharged by about 20 factories, most of which were shifted around the source of the city's drinking water from the province's developed southern areas.

Imposing fines on polluting units and local governments for their failure to check pollution is a good way of saving the environment. But financial rewards to villages and townships that take effective steps or have already succeeded in their environmental protection plans will prompt other areas to emulate their feats.

It's difficult for less developed areas to invite only eco-friendly industrial units because they want fast development. Quite a number of rural townships and villages have suffered a great deal with their rivers, and even soils, badly contaminated by untreated pollutants discharged by factories.

We have already paid too heavy a price for the development of the coastal areas. Hence, we can no longer afford to wait passively, for that would be a recipe for disaster. Passivity can only result in more environmental damage in rural areas, ultimately threatening our food safety.

The environment cannot be saved through a better-late-than-never policy. Instead, now or never should be our guiding philosophy, and the central government has realized that by expanding the financial reward policy throughout the country.

But then it's quite possible that some villages, townships or counties could fudge figures to get the financial aid without actually reducing pollution. If the central government is liberal with financial help, it has to be equally harsh with factories and governments that try to deceive the treasury with fake data to ensure the environment is damaged no further.

(China Daily 03/05/2009 page9)