[Stoves] News 2 November 2016: NYT: Farmers’ Unchecked Crop Burning Fuels India’s Air Pollution

[Traveller]

As if plastic burning, landfills, and chemical spills - sources not
recognized in apportionment models

You see what you look for. Deliberate blindness cannot be cured.

What difference can NGT make? Same as GACC with HAP?

Along with cleaner-burning biomass stoves, there has to be an integral
strategy to manage biomass wastes in both rural and urban areas. (I have
suffered both open leaf and plastic burning in cities and crop burning in
farms.)

Context is everything. Statistics be damned.

N
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Farmers’ Unchecked Crop Burning Fuels India’s Air Pollution
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/world/asia/farmers-unchecked-crop-burning-fuels-indias-air-pollution.html>
NYT
2 November 2016
ASIA PACIFIC <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/asia/index.html>Farmers’
Unchecked Crop Burning Fuels India’s Air Pollution

By GEETA ANANDNOV. 2, 2016

Photo
A farmer burned a harvested wheat field last month on the outskirts of
Jalandhar, India.Credit Shammi Mehra/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MAULVIWALA, India — Desperate to reduce the pollution that has made New
Delhi’s air quality among the worst in the world
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/world/asia/cities-in-india-among-the-most-polluted-who-says.html>,
the city has banned private cars for two-week periods and campaigned to
reduce its ubiquitous fireworks during holiday celebrations.

But one thing India
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/india/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>
has
not seriously tried could make the most difference: curtailing the fires
set to rice fields by hundreds of thousands of farmers in the nearby states
of Punjab and Haryana, where much of the nation’s wheat and rice is grown.

Although India’s environmental court, the National Green Tribunal, told the
government last year to stop farmers from burning the straw left over from
their rice harvests, NASA satellite images
<https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?p=geographic&l=MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),VIIRS_SNPP_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor,Reference_Features(hidden),Reference_Labels,Coastlines,VIIRS_SNPP_Fires_375m_Night(hidden),VIIRS_SNPP_Fires_375m_Day&t=2016-11-01&z=3&v=65.36657008891676,23.68144953111502,86.95250758891676,37.79668390611502&ab=off&as=2016-10-18&ae=2016-10-27&av=3&al=true>
in
recent weeks have shown virtually no abatement. Farmers are continuing to
burn most of the leftover straw — an estimated 32 million tons — to make
room to plant their winter wheat crop.

While fireworks associated with the Hindu holiday of Diwali were blamed for
a particularly bad smog problem in recent days, smoke from the crop fires
blowing across the northern plains into New Delhi accounts for about
one-quarter of the most dangerous air pollution in the winter months. In
the growing metropolis of nearly 20 million people, pollution soared
<http://www.dpccairdata.com/dpccairdata/display/mmView15MinData.php> well
above hazardous levels in the past week.

Agricultural Fires in India

Farmers start fires to clear out pests and turn crop residue into
fertilizing ash.
Lahore PAKISTANPUNJAB NEPAL New Delhi Agra RAJASTHAN India Approximate
locations of active fires on Nov. 1
Source: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response
Team, GSFC

By The New York Times

Farmers 100 miles north in Punjab were well aware that they were
contaminating the capital’s air, they said in interviews, and were willing
to consider other ways to dispose of the excess straw, but could not afford
the options offered by the government.

“We are smart, and we have adopted new technology in the past,” said
Jaswant Singh <https://www.facebook.com/geeta.anand.338?fref=ts>, 53, as he
watched a fire sweep across a 20-acre field near his village, Maulviwala,
about 140 miles northwest of New Delhi.

He planned to set his own seven-and-a-half-acre rice paddy ablaze in a
couple of days, he said, “because we can’t afford to pay for the new
technology ourselves.”

The air was thick with smoke that evening as I drove the two hours back to
Punjab’s capital, Chandigarh, after spending several hours with Mr. Singh
and other farmers. The smoke made it hard to see, slowing traffic to a
crawl, and breathing was difficult. My lungs hurt with each breath, even
though I have never had respiratory problems.

The smoke rising from the fires visible on farms on either side of the road
would most likely reach Delhi in another week, depending on the wind’s
strength and direction. Farmers began burning their fields two weeks ago,
and levels of the smallest particles, called PM 2.5 and believed to pose
the greatest health risk, were already soaring.

On Monday night, levels of these particles in one Delhi neighborhood
reached 688 micrograms per cubic meter, more than 10 times the healthy
limit set by the Indian government, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee’s
website said. In every neighborhood where air quality data was available,
particle levels were at least four times the limit, putting most areas in
the hazardous range by Indian standards, which are more lenient than those
set by the World Health Organization.

Asked how they could keep burning their crop remnants knowing they were
causing health problems in New Delhi, Mr. Singh and other farmers said they
were deeply concerned, especially because their families also suffered from
the ill effects of the smoke. But still, they said, they could not afford
to dispose of the material any other way.

In theory, as is often the case in India, it should be relatively easy to
stop the burning. The government is promoting a seeder that can be mounted
on a tractor and used to plant wheat without the need to dispose of the
straw left after the rice harvest.

But Mr. Singh and others I spoke to said they could not afford the $1,900
cost of the most widely available brand, Happy Seeder. That is as much as
some farmers earn from their entire rice harvest, they said. And they are
reluctant to incur more debt, having already taken out loans for their
daughters’ marriages and past equipment purchases.
Photo
Laborers working on the roof of a residential complex on a smoggy morning
in New Delhi on Wednesday.CreditAdnan Abidi/Reuters

To encourage farmers to use the seeders, the government is offering to pay
half the cost. Yet it has money for only a tiny fraction of the farmers,
said Bhure Lal, chairman of the Environmental Pollution (Prevention and
Control) Authority, which was set up by the Supreme Court of India in 1998.

Another alternative to crop burning, Mr. Lal and the farmers said, would be
to create a market for the excess straw. So far, seven power plants that
generate electricity from straw have been built in Punjab, and six more are
on the drawing board.

But together, all 13 would consume only 1.5 million of the 20 million tons
of straw produced in Punjab every year, or less than 10 percent, said
Polash Mukerjee, a researcher at the Center for Science and Environment, a
New Delhi research and advocacy group, who also assists Mr. Lal’s
environmental authority. That is not enough to create a market for the
straw, so it would still cost farmers far more to gather it and bring it to
the plant than to burn it in their fields.

“If the government paid me for my straw, I’d stop burning it today,” said
Shabaz Singh, 32, who grows 25 acres of rice and wheat in Maulviwala.

The burning of crops was outlawed some time ago. But, like many laws in
India, it is widely ignored. Certainly, none of the farmers feared being
hit with fines that are supposed to range from $38 to $225.

“If the government wants to stop it, it can stop it,” said Harjinder Singh,
a father of two school-age children from Duttal village, who was the only
farmer I met on my visit who said he did not intend to burn his crop. “But
the government lacks the will to do so.”

Mr. Singh and his brother, Narinder Singh, 38, were riding on a tractor
pulling the Happy Seeder device when I stopped by their 12-acre farm last
week. They used a government subsidy to cover half of the cost of the
device, and paid about $950 themselves.

It has worked well for them in the three years since they bought it, the
brothers said. Not only did they avoid burning their straw, they said, but
their yields of both wheat and rice went up, suggesting that leaving the
straw on the ground instead of burning it was improving the fertility of
the soil.

Mr. Mukerjee said he believed many more farmers would adopt the Happy
Seeder machines if the government made subsidies more widely available.

But so far, neither state nor federal governments have committed the money,
he and Mr. Lal said. The Punjab government told Mr. Lal’s environmental
authority that providing all Punjab farmers with Happy Seeder machines
would cost about $1.5 billion.

“In real terms, the government hasn’t created any alternatives for the
farmers,” Mr. Mukerjee said.

Mr. Mukerjee said the government of Haryana had made some effort to crack
down on crop burning, reporting about 1,200 fires and $12,000 in fines
collected. That is a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of farmers in
the state, he said, but it is a start.
2COMMENTS

Mr. Lal said that Punjab had not notified him of  any punishments to
farmers, and that he doubted much headway would be made this year because
of state elections now underway.

Harjinder Singh, the farmer who uses the Happy Seeder, agreed. “Everyone
understands that the elections are coming, and the government is not
serious about stopping crop burning this year,” he said. “They all think
that maybe they will have to stop burning their crops next year.”



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