Via the South China Morning Post: Agriculture feels the choke as China smog starts to foster disastrous conditions. Click through for the full report and a video. Excerpt:
Worsening smog on the mainland is blocking natural light and could spell disaster for agriculture, scientists have warned.
He Dongxian , an associate professor with China Agricultural University's College of Water Resources and Civil Engineering, said an experiment in Beijing over recent months showed a drastic slowdown in the photosynthesis process, which allows plants to thrive.
Applied on a larger scale, such a slowdown could affect agriculture, which contributes 10 per cent to GDP. Farm output was likely to be affected by serious air pollution in winter and spring, with the prices of agricultural products expected to rise.
The warning comes as choking air is blanketing a quarter of the mainland and scientists say they are already seeing the detrimental effects. In He's tests, chilli and tomato seeds, which normally take about 20 days to grow into seedlings under artificial light in a laboratory, took more than two months to sprout at a greenhouse farm in Beijing's Changping district.
Membranes and pollutants sticking to the greenhouse's surface cut the amount of light available to the plants by half, He said.
Depriving plants of light means photosynthesis - the process by which plants convert light to chemical energy - can barely be sustained.
Most seedlings at the farm were weak or sick. "They will be lucky to live at all. Now almost every farm is caught in a smog panic," He said, adding that the poor seedling quality would cut agricultural output this year.
And if the smog persisted or intensified, the country's food supply would face devastating consequences, He warned.
"A large number of representatives of agricultural companies have suddenly showed up at academic meetings on photosynthesis in recent months and sought desperately for solutions," He said.
As of midnight Wednesday, local time, Bejing's Air Quality Index was 528 (hazardous), down from a two-day high of 552.