"Our Skin Swells Up And Becomes Rotten" - China Closes Illegal Smelters As Crops, People Fall Ill

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Local farmers in the 1.5 million-strong Jianli county have suffered severe rashes and other skin ailments since March this year, when local industrialists and their counterparts from nearby Hunan province opened plants to smelt the highly profitable alloy element vanadium, local media reported.

In the absence of proper procedures, waste emitted by these underground plants contained toxic cadmium and arsenic. Plants often dumped waste into local water networks, contaminating the fields and salinating shaft water.

"We can only leave the cotton to rot now," farmer Shi Qiang told Hubei-based Changjiang Times newspaper. "Once we get in the field, we become itchy all over the body. Our skin even swells up and becomes rotten." The contaminated water also spread to several villages with illegal vanadium plants, plaguing tens of thousands of hectares of fields.

Workers were burning vanadium stones at a 2,000 sq m plant in Xiongzhou village on Oct 9, local media reported, as white smoke billowed from chimneys and tea-colored water seeped into the Laojiang River nearby. Neighboring Hunan province, though rich in vanadium, had earlier shut down all illegal plants. Many Hunan plant owners then moved their business to Hubei.

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http://english.people.com.cn/90001/6515114.html

All of our problems will miraculously go away if government just gets out of the way of industry. They will regulate themselves! None of this EPA bullshit or worrying incessantly about whether the workers you hired are legal or illegal or if you are paying them decent wages. It's because of all this regulation and red-tape that good industries like vanadium smelters choose to do business in China instead of the US.

If we want to compete with China, we can't just slap tariffs on their imports. That would be anti-competitive. Instead, we need to relax our environmental standards, break the unions, eliminate OSHA, and compete away! Then we will live in a capitalistic paradise! (well, a tiny handful of us will anyway)

Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle.

This is horrible