For decades, high levels of cadmium and other toxic heavy metals have polluted China’s waterways. Through irrigation they have ended up in village rice paddies. Villagers complain of bone pains. Some have stopped eating their own crops, feeding it to livestock, or selling it if they can.
Chinese farmer Huang Yunsheng, 74, was not able to sell a single pound of his 2010 rice harvest. “The grain husks are all black. Nobody would take it. We didn’t dare to eat it ourselves, so we fed it all to our chickens and pigs,” Huang told the Southern Weekly in a Jan. 6 report.
