Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has conducted investigation of farmlands with high heavy metal contamination potential from 2010 to 2017. In addition, the policy of farmland pollution prevention and management was also implemented by EPA in 2018. According to the survey of farmland pollution, farmlands were contaminated with low-concentration heavy metal through irrigation water over long periods of time. Moreover, factories in industrial and agricultural mixed areas illegally discharge large amounts of waste water, which contain high-concentration heavy metal, into unknown ditches and road gutter at last contaminate the irrigation water and farmlands. In order to establish the long-term effective precaution and prevention procedures to avoid heavy metal pollution in farmlands, the “Management Project for Pollution Source in Farmland Soils” is progressed. This project firstly focusing on searching for the pollution source management strategies in Japan, America, China, Germany, and Taiwan. After the information collecting and searching process, this project has proposed the strategies to prevent farmlands from being polluted with heavy metal, which mainly about enhancement of land use management, improvement of cross-department coordination, announcements of the information about illegal factories, and enactment of laws with penalties and guidance for factories. Secondly, three polluted zones were selected and investigated in this project. Based on possible pollution intervention points, suspicious polluters were defined according to each factory process operation in the zones. And with the results of environment investigation, the team has also evaluated the increasing trend of heavy metal concentration in farmlands. Through collecting and summarizing the information about sporadic farmlands contamination cases, and analyzing the performance of agriculture-related water quality protection strategies for Puxin stream, New street stream, Nankan stream, and Old street stream, the team in this project has made relevant regulations and proposed revising for “Reference Manual for Verification Procedures of Farmlands with Heavy Metal Pollution” and the draft of “Pollution Source Assessment Procedure”. During the execution of this project, the team has also regularly maintained the “National Farmland Soil Management System” and assisted EPA to manage farmland pollution sites and integrate data.

Farmland Pollution, Pollution Source Management, Pollution Source Tracing