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Yangtze River Less Tainted Than Expected

Posted on: Friday, 2 November 2007, 18:00 CDT

By ELIANE ENGELER

GENEVA - Chinese and Swiss scientists said Friday the Yangtze River is less polluted than expected, but only because the vast amounts of water dilute farm and industrial waste that still pose a serious threat to animals and plants.

Environmentalists warned the findings should not be seen as a clean bill of health for the Yangtze, where water quality has continually deteriorated. Because of its large size, the 3,900-mile-long Yangtze cannot be compared to other rivers, they said.

Around 25 billion tons of waste is poured every year into the Yangtze, the world's third-largest river, said a joint Chinese-Swiss expedition that analyzed the river's water quality.

"While the pollution level is enormous, the concentration of pollutants remains comparable with that of other rivers, given the dilution effect caused by the enormous rate of water flow," said a statement by the Swiss Agency for Development, which supported the expedition.

The pollution stems mostly from the huge amounts of mineral fertilizers used in agriculture, the scientists said, adding that the nitrogen level in the river has doubled over the past 20 years.

Heavy metals in industrial waste also pollute the river, according to the scientists, who analyzed hundreds of water and sediment samples in laboratories in China, Switzerland and Australia.

Some 1.1 million cubic feet of water per second pours from the Yangtze into the East China Sea, the scientists said. Pollutants were especially concentrated in the delta, including large amounts of nitrogen and arsenic.

"The more nitrate enters the sea, the more the blue-green algae grow, mainly at lower sea levels, and the oxygen becomes scarce," said Beat Mueller, a geochemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.

Ger Bergkamp, head of the water program at the World Conservation Union, said the results were deceptive.

"We find it rather misleading to focus on 'it is less than expected,' but it is actually worse than any measurement before," Bergkamp said. "The situation is very severe, affecting people's health, the quality of water for the irrigation of crops, the water-intake to cities."

Dermot O'Gorman, country representative of WWF in China, said he had not read the expedition's conclusions, but pollution levels in the Yangtze are very bad and the fact that pollutants tend to be diluted in the massive volume of water "still does not mean the Yangtze River is not in a dangerous situation."

The expedition team said the extinction of freshwater baiji dolphins, declared in 2006, cannot be seen as a direct result of the poor water quality in the Yangtze. Industry, agriculture, increasing waterway traffic, underwater noise and fishing methods all degraded the baiji's natural habitat and led to their extinction, they said.

"The ecosystem of the Yangtze can be saved if China intensifies its activities in water protection now," said August Pfluger, director of the Zurich-based baiji.org Foundation, who organized the expedition.

"China needs to urgently adopt similar rehabilitation and development programs that were used to improve the quality of rivers in Europe only a short time ago," they said.

The expedition was set up together with the Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan and was carried out under the auspices of the Chinese Agricultural Ministry.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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