MOSCOW, March 15 (RIA Novosti) – The Chinese authorities have failed to stop a massive flood of hog carcasses into a tributary of the Yangtze River, which has now risen to 7,545 bodies over the past week, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported on Friday.
But the municipal authorities insisted the water was not polluted in the Huangpu River, which provides 22 percent of the drinking water for Shanghai, China's most populous city and home to 23 million people, 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) south of the Russian-Chinese border, China Daily said.
At least some of the pigs died of a disease called circovirus, which cannot be passed to humans, China Daily said, citing forensic tests performed on the dead pigs.
The authorities in the Jiaxing district of Zhejiang Province, a rural area upstream of Shanghai, said 70,000 of its 7 million pigs have died since the start of 2013 due to poor husbandry and extreme weather in the region, but claimed all were disposed of properly, Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.
Hundreds of pig corpses were first reported in the Huangpu River last weekend. The origin of some of them was proven by ear tags, which identified them as the property of local farmers in Jiaxing, the South China Morning Post said.
Jiaxing farmers admitted dumping the pig carcasses in the river, but denied the animals were killed by any disease harmful to humans, the report said.
No one has yet been punished over the incident, but 46 people were jailed on Wednesday over an unrelated scandal in which a local businessman illegally bought about 1,000 sick or dead pigs and then processed them for food, the Global Times English-language China news website said.
Chinese farmers are required by law to sterilize and bury dead pigs properly. But the compensation of 80 yuan ($13) per properly buried pig offered by the authorities is too small and can take months to collect, the Global Times said.
The fine for dumping dead pigs is only 2,000 yuan ($320), the report said. China also has no nationwide legislation against water pollution, and local rules are often ignored by the authorities on the ground, China Daily said.
China’s rapid industrial growth over the past three decades has come at a severe cost to the country’s environment, which is of increasing concern to the authorities and the population alike. Two of 10 entries on the 2012 list of the world’s worst polluted cities by Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based environmental watchdog, were in China.
The Huangpu river incident was met with much scorn in the Chinese blogosphere, where it was dubbed “Life of Pig,” a play on “Life of Pi,” a recent animal-themed movie by Hollywood-based director Ang Lee, an ethnic Chinese.
“Life is happy in Shanghai: we simply turn on the faucet and oops, here comes fresh pork soup!,” according to a popular sarcastic joke on the Chinese blogosphere reported in English by Xinhua.
