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

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Thanks for the heads up, Nikhil.

As is clearly stated in the article below and in the linked one, the general air pollution in the cities is not primarily caused by seasonal crop burning once a year, it is caused by all sorts of other things, especially burning garbage - the poor often burn garbage.

I wonder how the WHO creates their list of polluted air cities because the worst are not reported. Perhaps there is no data provided or government's are reluctant to share it.

Regions around Ulaanbaatar had an annual average or 620 with nothing during summer, so it was >900‎ in real life most of the year. The peaks were over 4000, easily, as the daily average. I have seen a peak of 5200 on the monitoring station outside Lodoysamba's office (it used to be UB_Air.com for real time tweets).

Harbin is worse than Ulaanbaatar. What about the other dozens of cities in that cold belt?  When people talk through their hats, they always mention Beijing as the coal burning whipping boy, even though burning coal is not allowed there.

I happened to be present in Beijing last hear during crop waste burning day (also illegal) in Hebei which is the province surrounding Beijing. The PM2.5 reading went over 400 in the city. The BBC, always looking to get in licks for the War on Coal dutifully reported the ‎event blaming dirty fuels (of course) and provided zoom lens video of the morning mist in the streets before it evaporated in the morning sun (it's humid in October so they had to get out early).

I think Delhi's 150 from garbage burning is far worse than 400 from smouldering biomass, if I had a choice of what to breathe.

The frustrating bit for India is that the straw could be turned into char dust with far less emissions and used for cooking fuel using available, cheap local technologies.

Nikhil: I want to ask about this quote from the online article:

"Air pollution killed about seven million people globally in 2012, making it the world’s biggest environmental health risk, the W.H.O. reported last month. About 80 percent of those deaths came from heart attacks and strokes, although air pollution also increases lung cancer deaths.‎"

Is this number, 7 million, referring to 'premature deaths' or modeled actual deaths based on some gl‎obal burden of disease model/negotiation? Or is it claimed deaths with a body count and a death certificate?

Surely the WHO is not in the business of reviewing death certificates and doctors are not in the business of writing 'air pollution' on them. In Tajikistan there are a few (3? 5?) deaths per year from indoor air ‎pollution (CO from reversing chimneys). Those get an actual IAQ death certificates and rightly so.

I rather suspect we have another case of misrepresentation that goes uncorrected around the Internet. How does this misrepresentation serve the public interest? I can't see it (it is misty in Istanbul this morning ).

Crispin





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
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/11/01/world/02indiaair-web/02indiaair-web-superJumbo.jpg]
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.

[https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2016/11/02/india-fires/f1334b0ebcc7453faa14f24c06c21832b097172c/india-Artboard_1.png]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
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/11/03/world/03indiaair2/03indiaair2-master675.jpg]
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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