Huge dust cloud threatens
Asia
By Geoffrey Lean in Washington
26 January 2003
Gigantic dust clouds swirling over China are
threatening the world's most populous country
with the first-ever "ecological meltdown", experts
here warn.
The clouds – which stretch for thousands of
miles over Asia and have even reached across
the Pacific to North America – are rising from a
rapidly growing dust bowl in northern China that
far outstrips the notorious one in the United
States in the 1930s.
It threatens to drive up the price of food and
greatly increase starvation worldwide, and could
lead to tens of millions of desperate Chinese
environmental refugees.
"No country has ever faced a potential ecological
catastrophe on the scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," says
Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington.
"Merely grasping its dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical
challenge."
Dust storms have been recorded in China for at least 2,700 years, but they are
now increasing alarmingly both in size and in number. The Chinese
Meteorological Agency says there were just five major storms in the country in
the whole of the 1950s. This rose to 23 in the 1990s. But the first two years of
this decade have almost equalled this figure already, with 20.
The storms – which peak in late winter and early spring – can blot out daylight
in Beijing and other cities, make it hard for millions of people to breathe and
destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of crops. They have closed schools
and airports in South Korea and Japan, and caused a Korean car factory to
shrink-wrap its vehicles as soon as they come off the production line to stop
them being spoiled.
They have even occasionally crossed the Pacific: one in April 2001 covered the
west of North America from Canada to Arizona with dust.
The clouds sweep up millions of tons of precious topsoil from Chinese fields
and pastures. Gone in a single day, the soil will take centuries to replace. But
this is just the most dramatic symptom of the accelerating spread of deserts
across the country, which is home to nearly one in every four people on the
planet.
Between 1994 and 1999, the country's Environmental Protection Agency
reports, the Gobi Desert expanded by 20,240 square miles, to within just 150
miles of Beijing, New, smaller, areas of desert are erupting all over the country.
In all, this "desertification" is affecting 40 per cent of the country's land. Partly as
a result, harvests – which more than quadrupled between 1950 and 1998 –
have fallen sharply, even as China's population and appetite grow.
In Ganzu province alone, some 4,000 villages are facing being submerged by
drifting sands, and the Earth Policy Institute believes that throughout the country
tens of millions of people may be forced off their land, dwarfing the migrations
of the "Okies" from the American dust bowl.
The institute blames "over-cultivation, overgrazing, over-cutting and
over-pumping" for the escalating catastrophe. Marginal land is being
increasingly pressed into cultivation, but quickly turns to dust under the strain.
The country's 290 million sheep and goats strip the vegetation off grazing lands.
Cutting down forests removes the trees that bind soil to the ground. And
excessive pumping of water from underground acquifers dramatically lowers
water tables, drying out the earth.
China is belatedly trying to get to grips with the crisis. It is planting 26 million
acres – a tenth of its grain-growing area – with trees. But many die because the
soil is already too thin; and, say critics, too many are being planted around
Beijing so as to try to "green" the city – and clean the air – before the 2008
Olympics.
As the crisis continues, Mr Brown predicts, the world will soon feel the pinch. So
far China has compensated for its falling harvests by eating stocks, but soon it
will have to buy massive amounts of grain on world markets. He warns: "Grain
prices could double – impoverishing more people in a shorter period of time
than any event in history. It would create a world food economy dominated by
scarcity rather than by surpluses, as has been the case over most of the last
half a century." |
