Let It Burn: Why China Is Looking the Other Way on Farm Fires
For years, China’s local governments have been leading a strict campaign to stamp out one of China’s biggest sources of air pollution: the burning of leftover crop stalks after harvest.
Now they are making a tactical retreat.
Fires caused by farmers burning leftover wheat, corn, and rice stalks to clear their land after harvest create a thick smog that can cloud cities in harmful pollutants and release climate-change-causing carbon emissions.
Farmers’ fires are a serious source of smog in countries from India to Brazil. But, as the world’s largest grain producer, the straw burning problem has been particularly acute in China, where over 800 million tons of stalks are generated each year.
China’s government has spent decades trying to reduce burning and find uses for straw — such as burying it in fields as fertilizer, or processing it into animal feed or biofuel — efforts which were stepped up after 2018 when several provinces banned burning entirely.
The zero-tolerance approach reduced fires and improved air quality, but over the past year, a growing number of areas have begun to allow burning again during specific timeframes.
The issue is a microcosm of the challenges facing China’s countryside, where growing crop outputs live side-by-side with a shrinking population, and overstretched local officials.
China’s grain output has risen more than 36% since the turn of the century, thanks to factors like better seeds, wider use of chemical fertilizer, and mechanized harvesting. This in turn has caused an influx in annual crop residue, while traditional uses of straw for home heating have declined.
Decades of city-bound migration have also led to a shortage of hands to clean up after harvest time, with the responsibilities often falling to the elderly, who favor straw burning as a quick solution.
And rural governments’ relatively low tax incomes limit the financial resources available to encourage farmers to gather crop residue so it can be repurposed for other uses.
Experts say that the turnaround is a recognition of the difficulties implementing blanket bans, which have been unpopular with farmers and pushed low-level officials to their limits. But concerns remain about the environmental impacts of a more relaxed attitude.
Intense pressure
Consider northeastern Heilongjiang province, neighboring Russia. Its status as China’s biggest grain grower has earned it a reputation as the country’s “breadbasket.”
Authorities began nationwide efforts to regulate straw burning in the late 1990s, starting off with bans near airports and highways before gradually tightening regulations and trying to create a market for products derived from straw.
Heilongjiang found success in encouraging farmers to collect straw for purposes other than burning. By 2012, the share of straw generated by farmers in the province being used for purposes like fertilizer and biofuel reached 75%, according to official data.
But much of the rest was burned after the fall harvest, adding to the already heavy smog caused by the turning on of coal-based systems to heat urban homes. In October 2013, the region’s worst-ever air pollution forced schools, hospitals, roads, and airports to close.
In the provincial capital Harbin, levels of PM2.5 — particles small enough to penetrate deep into human lungs — reached more than 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter, far higher than levels considered safe. Images of the smog shocked the country and made international headlines.
In response, local officials got tougher on fires, starting to use satellite data to track their location.
Air quality improved, but the province still accounted for about half of the nation’s total straw fires by 2016. Farmers started burning straw late at night to avoid detection.
In response to public concerns, China in 2018 revised its national air pollution law to include provisions encouraging local governments to implement all-out bans on crop burning and impose fines of up to 2,000 yuan ($275) for violations.
Heilongjiang, along with several other provinces, started its province-wide ban the same year. The province began publishing daily data on fires, and the first fire detected each season would be the target of heavy media coverage and a province-level investigation.
The province was divided into a grid, with county-level government staff responsible for fires in their assigned sections. For each fire detected, counties stood to lose 300,000 yuan from their budget.
On-the-ground patrolling for fires, often at nighttime, was largely the job of the lowest rung of rural government personnel in China: village officials. If two straw fires were detected in a village in a single day, its government committee would face penalties.
The province also set up financial incentives for farmers to avoid crop burning, providing more than 4 billion yuan in subsidies in 2019. This helped fund more than a thousand straw-to-biomass fuel conversion stations, with farmers remunerated for their supplies. Farmers also received subsidies on “chopper” machines to gather the straw.
Heilongjiang’s fires reduced rapidly following the ban and were down more than 50% in 2018, according to a study published last year.
The share of farmers in the province who cited burning as their main method for straw disposal also fell from 47% to 17%, leading to a major decrease in air pollutants, a separate study found.
It was a similar story nationwide: straw burning bans in multiple provinces in 2018 resulted in a drop of nearly 50% in emissions of PM2.5 from crop fires compared with 2013 levels, according to one study.
A change of tactics
But Heilongjiang’s campaign wouldn’t eliminate burning entirely.
While air improved in the autumn, many farmers continued burning after the spring harvest. The consequences became clear in April 2020, when the province’s second-largest city, Qiqihar, recorded concentrations of PM2.5 above 800 micrograms per cubic meter.
Nationally, official data states that 90% of straw is now disposed of in ways other than burning, suggesting that fires were still used to dispose of much of the rest. Government satellite monitoring detected over 14,000 crop fires nationwide in 2023, mostly in Heilongjiang and other northeastern provinces.
Among the reasons why crop burning has continued, two stand out.
First, many farmers are attached to the practice and often say it helps with removing pests and fertilizing fields — beliefs passed down through generations. Farmers also think ash from burned crops adds nutrients to soil, a claim disputed by scientists, who argue that the intense heat destroys useful microorganisms.
But researchers have also found that the practice of burying stubble as a fertilizer, the most common method of disposal advocated by governments, can cause other problems, such as a proliferation of pests whose larvae may be present in the straw.
“Where rainfall is limited, (straw) residue stays dry, and it’s much harder for it to be broken down,” Liu Gang, an environmental science professor at the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, told Sixth Tone.
Second, farmers often find that market prices for straw, even with added subsidies, aren’t high enough to justify the effort it takes to gather it from their fields.
Collecting corn stalks from about one and a half acres of land — a typical household farm size in China — plus stacking and hauling them may take four laborers three days of hard work. And that’s before crushing the stalks, plowing the land, and burying the stalks underground.
The entire process costs each rural household nearly 800 yuan each year, according to one survey. Subsidies offered by local governments — such as the 600 yuan per hectare paid in Heilongjiang for straw field returning — often aren’t enough to cover costs.
“From an economic standpoint, burning straw is the best option for farmers,” Liu says. “It’s the most convenient and cost-effective method.”
As a result, officials are squeezed between intense pressure from higher-level officials above to eradicate burning, and from below by farmers who resist the ban.
In northeastern China, village heads have to keep an eye on the fields “day and night” to watch for fires, local media reported.
Companies that use straw to make biofuels or animal feed pay farmers, but the huge market supply means prices are low.
Farmers often find straw recycling unprofitable “due to insufficient funding, technology, and market support,” Yuan Fangcheng, a professor of rural governance at Central China Normal University, told Sixth Tone.
Bigger subsidies could be a solution. But that runs up against local government finances, which can often be tight in the countryside. China’s rural tax revenue is also under pressure from rural flight and a years-long fall in property sales.
“This type of expenditure far exceeds the affordability of some counties and cities,” Yuan added. “Large agricultural counties generally face revenue and spending pressure.”
Complaints about burning were publicly aired during China’s annual top legislative meetings in Beijing last year. Dai Ping, the manager of an agricultural bureau in Northeast China, complained of “difficulties in grassroots management” created by the bans, while academics called for the policy to be loosened.
Officials in the city of Changde in the central Hunan province last April admitted in a reply to a local policy advisor that the burning ban had “added to officials’ work pressure” and led to “complaints” from farmers, making the policy “difficult” to implement.
The city announced a move from a complete ban on burning to a more flexible approach in August, allowing farmers to burn crop residue in designated areas.
Similar policies, known as “districting and limiting burning,” have been adopted in at least 30 cities and counties in the province since August 2024, allowing burning in designated areas on days seen as having low air pollution risk.
The switch in tactics is part of a central government campaign to reduce pressure on low-level rural officials, who have been overly burdened by policy targets.
Media reports about the policy shift have prompted heated debate online. A related hashtag on the short video platform Douyin has amassed over 400 million views.
“Crop burning is really deadly. Do you know what it feels like to wake up in the middle of the night? Living on the 14th floor, you can’t see downstairs,” one internet user from Heilongjiang wrote in a comment about the policy relaxation.
The response from farmers has been more positive. “Hunan is taking a flexible and humane step,” a 59-year-old farmer from the eastern Anhui province said in a video on Douyin.
Experts have raised concerns about fairness, with burdens falling unevenly between farmers in restricted and non-restricted zones.
It is also yet to be seen how the policies can be combined with China’s plan to peak carbon emissions by 2030. The text of the plan, released in 2021, specifically calls for “strict control” of crop burning.
In Heilongjiang, officials stuck with their zero-tolerance approach in 2024, setting the ambitious target of ensuring 95% of crop residue wasn’t burned.
Meanwhile, the central government urged rural areas to establish designated zones for controlled straw burning based on local conditions while promoting alternative uses, including expanding its role in field-returning methods.
According to a joint policy document released by multiple departments this past January, China aims to prevent severe pollution from concentrated straw burning and increase crop residue utilization to more than 88% nationwide by 2027.
The knock-on effects of the more relaxed approaches taken by other provinces require more research, Liu, the Nanjing-based professor said.
“How far from cities, highways, and airports can burning take place, how much can be burned each time, and for how long, all require testing.”
Editor: Tom Hancock.
(Header image: A farmer burns the straw in Jilin province, April 2023. VCG)
