Interesting article:
China is losing the war on advancing deserts
Lester R. Brown IHT
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
The world's biggest dust bowl
WASHINGTON China is now at war. Its territory is being claimed not by invading
armies but by expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are
forming, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And, worse, the growing deserts
are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China's territory each year.
Desert expansion has accelerated with each successive decade since 1950. China's
Environmental Protection Agency reports that from 1994 to 1999 the Gobi Desert
expanded by 52,400 square kilometers, or 20,240 square miles, an area half the size
of South Korea. With the advancing Gobi now within 240 kilometers, or 150 miles,
of Beijing, China's leaders are beginning to sense the gravity of the situation.
Overplowing and overgrazing are converging to create a dust bowl of historic
dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China,
the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove literally millions of tons
of topsoil in a single day - soil that can take centuries to replace.
For the outside world, it is these dust storms that draw attention to the deserts that are
forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a
huge dust storm from China that left people in Seoul literally gasping for breath.
Schools were closed, airline flights were canceled, and clinics were overrun with
patients having difficulty breathing. Retail sales fell. Koreans have come to dread the
arrival of what they now call "the fifth season" - the dust storms of late winter and
early spring. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China. Although not
as directly exposed as Koreans are, the Japanese complain about the dust and the
brown rain that streaks their windshields and windows.
Each year, residents of eastern Chinese cities such as Beijing and Tianjin hunker
down as the dust storms begin. In addition to having problems with breathing and
stinging eyes, people are constantly working to keep dust out of homes and to clean
doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. Farmers and herders, whose livelihoods
are blowing away, are paying an even heavier price.
A report by a U.S. Embassy official in May 2001, after a visit to Xilingol Prefecture
in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, notes that although 97 percent of the
region is officially classified as grasslands, a third of the terrain now appears to be
desert. The report says the prefecture's livestock population climbed from 2 million
as recently as 1977 to 18 million in 2000. A Chinese scientist doing grassland
research in the prefecture says that if recent desertification trends continue, Xilingol
will be uninhabitable in 15 years.
A more recent U.S. Embassy report titled "Desert Mergers and Acquisitions" says
satellite images show two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to
form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the
west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts - the Taklimakan and Kumtag - are
also heading for a merger. Highways there are regularly inundated by sand dunes.
In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the Earth's
ecosystem, China is on the leading edge. A human population of 1.3 billion and a
livestock population of more than 400 million are weighing heavily on the land.
While overplowing is now being partly remedied by paying farmers to plant their
grainland in trees, overgrazing continues largely unabated. China's cattle, sheep and
goat population tripled from 1950 to 2002. The United States, a country with
comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle. China has 106 million. But
whereas the United States has 8 million sheep and goats, China has 298 million.
Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying
the land's protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and
converting productive rangeland into desert. Northwestern China is on the verge of a
massive ecological meltdown.
The fallout from the dust storms is social as well as economic. Millions of rural
Chinese may be uprooted and forced to migrate eastward as the drifting sand covers
their land. Expanding deserts are driving villagers from their homes in Gansu, Inner
Mongolia and Ningxia provinces. An Asian Development Bank assessment of
desertification in Gansu Province reports that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by
drifting sands.
The American dust bowl of the 1930's forced 2.5 million "Okies" and other refugees
to leave the land, many of them heading from Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas to
California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and during the 1930's
the U.S. population was only 150 million, compared with 1.3 billion in China today.
Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China's may eventually
measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. Embassy report titled "The Grapes of
Wrath in Inner Mongolia" noted, "unfortunately, China's 21st century 'Okies' have
no California to escape to - at least not in China."
Planting marginal cropland in trees helps correct some of the mistakes of
overplowing, but it does not deal with the overgrazing issue. Arresting desertification
may depend more on grass than trees - on both permitting existing grasses to recover
and planting grass in denuded areas.
Beijing is trying to arrest the spread of deserts by encouraging pastoralists to reduce
their flocks of sheep and goats by 40 percent, but in communities where wealth is
measured not in income but in the number of livestock owned and where most
families are living under the poverty line, such cuts are not easy. Some local
governments are requiring stall-feeding of livestock with forage gathered by hand,
hoping that this confinement measure will permit grasslands to recover.
China is taking some of the right steps to halt the advancing desert, but it has a long
way to go to reduce livestock numbers to a sustainable level. At this point, there is no
plan in place or on the drawing board that will halt the advancing deserts.
The entire world has a stake in China's winning the war with the advancing deserts
given its economic leadership role. But winning will not be easy. Qu Geping, the
chairman of the Environment and Resources Committee of the National People's
Congress, estimates that the rehabilitation of land in the areas where it is technically
feasible would cost $28.3 billion. Halting the advancing deserts will require a
massive commitment of financial and human resources, one that may force the
government to make a hard choice: build costly proposed south-north
water-diversion projects or battle the advancing deserts that are marching eastward
and that could eventually occupy Beijing.
The writer is president of the Earth Policy Institute. This comment was distributed by
Global Viewpoint for Tribune Media Services International. |
