http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0813-06.htm
Published on Wednesday,
August 13, 2003 by the International Herald Tribune
China is Losing the War on Advancing Deserts
by Lester R. Brown
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.
http://www.earth-policy.org/
Copyright © 2003
the International Herald Tribune
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