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In fact, water pollution in China is at least as bad – so severe that it has been proven to cause gastrointestinal and other types of cancer in some villages. Although these “cancer villages” have been around since the nineties, the government only recently recognized their presence. Many times in these cases, the pollution is caused by chemical dumping from nearby factories.

Dumping of industrial chemicals, agricultural waste, and urban wastewater has contaminated China’s water resources such that over half of all rivers in the country are unsafe for human contact. About 70 percent of the water pollution nationwide comes from agriculture, particularly runoff from fertilizers, pesticides, and animal waste. The presence of heavy metals in seafood and rice has become increasingly common, passing on water contamination to the food supply. At the same time, while most water use comes from the agricultural industry in rural areas, poor households in the same areas find themselves increasingly disadvantaged when it comes to securing clean water. For these households, clean water has become progressively scarcer.