DM Monitoring
TIANJIN: Wang Deliang, a 51-year-old farmer in Xiguanfang Village in north China’s Tianjin Municipality, squats in his lush green paddy field, checking crabs that bob up from under the water and blow bubbles into the air.
“I can rest assured now that the crabs and rice are both growing fine,” said Wang, who just started breeding a new batch of crabs.
Having worked all his life in the paddy fields, Wang witnessed how his village had evolved from a wasteland of saline-alkali soil and industrial sewage, since a 736-square-km green belt started forming between downtown Tianjin and the Tianjin Binhai New Area to the east. Harvests at the village used to be humble as Shuangqiao River, farmers’ main source of irrigation, was plagued by wastewater from industrial parks nearby, said Wang. Despite his hard work, rice yield per mu (about 0.07 hectares) rarely stretched beyond 300 kg.
In 2018, Tianjin rolled out a plan for covering 70 percent of the 736-square-km belt with water and greens by 2035, and Xiguanfang was listed as a first-tier restorative zone for ecological corridors and farmlands. The green belt, 50 km in length and 15 km in width, has provided a transition from the inland ecological system to the coastal system since ancient times, a vital function weakened due to urbanization, said Zhou Changlin, vice president of the Tianjin Institute of Urban Planning and Design.
To restore this function and help improve the environment in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Tianjin vows to cover 30 percent of the first-tier zones with forests, downsize the land area of industrial construction, rewire the local water network and integrate 65 industrial parks to 17 clusters.
By mid-August this year, the green belt had gradually taken shape as the city forested 67,600 mu of land, increasing forest coverage in the first-tier zones to 20.4 percent, official data showed.
At Xiguanfang, three new sewage treatment centers helped clear the Shuangqiao River and allowed crabs to share the water with crops, offering farmers like Wang diverse sources of income.
“Polluted water would kill the crabs,” said Wang. “When the water is cleaner, farming becomes more environmentally friendly as crabs can produce organic fertilizer for the rice.’’
