Top-Down Implementation and Fragmented Bureaucracy: An Analysis of the Livestock Waste Prevention Regulation in China

Abstract

Livestock and poultry raising is the largest source of agricultural non-point source pollution and an essential aspect of environmental governance. To resolve the issue, China has introduced a series of policies to promote the recycling of livestock and poultry excrement since 2014. This study uses data from government documents, policy papers, and official husbandry statistics to understand the effects and policy implications of husbandry waste regulations from 2014 to 2019. We examined the planning and implementation guidelines of husbandry waste control programs and supplemented the archival data with 29 in-depth interviews with local environmental protection officers as well as husbandry operators in five provinces from 2015 to 2018. Our findings indicate that the new regulatory regime has three fundamental issues: First, the inconsistency between national and ministerial policy goals; Second, the binding targets of these policies create unforeseen consequences in their implementation, which has hindered the establishment of a national resource recycling system; Third, the regulations provide few incentives to promote the development of sustainable husbandry industry.

Pig in the Middle: Environment, Health and Development Dimensions of the Pork Sector in China

“…The Communique of the First National Census of Agricultural Pollution Sources reported that in 2007 livestock and poultry sectors contributed 12.7 million tons of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and 0.7 million tons of ammonia nitrogen discharge. In 2012, large scale livestock and poultry farming accounted for 95.8% and 78.1% of COD and ammonia nitrogen from agriculture, and 41.9% and 41.5% from all sources (Jin et al, 2022). This is partly due to the sheer number of pigs in relation to land and water resources but it is also a function of the separation of livestock raising from crop farming and the replacement of animal manure with synthetic fertilizer, the use of which increased by four times from 1978 to 2012 (Carter et al, 2012;Chadwick et al, 2015;Sun et al, 2012).…”

“…Some problems relate to the different standards and definitions of scale used by the MOA and the MEE, and even in different documents issued by the same ministry which result in inconsistent targets for the treatment of pollution and the reuse of waste. Others are the lack of consideration of local en-vironmental conditions (for example the availability of water and climate factors) in the government's promotion of the relocation of pig farms from Southern to Northern China (see also Jin et al, 2022), as well as technical problems connecting clean energy sources to the power grid. Underlying some of the problems is a fundamental difference in the way that the two sectors regard pig urine and excrement, with agriculture seeing it as a resource, and the environmental protection sector as a "pollutant" that needs to be controlled.…”