Water

Country Water Action: People's Republic of China
Advance of Deserts Slows But Continues
July 2006

The People’s Republic of China claims that a partial victory has been won in slowing the spread of encroaching deserts. Will the centuries-old war to stop the sands from eating up farmland and water resources be won completely?

Contents The Great Green Wall of China A Big Bowl of Dust Dust Elsewhere, Dust Everywhere Reduce Grazing to Aid Greening

The approaching 2008 Olympic Games will be “green” as Beijing promised, as the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) doubles up efforts to combat desertification. 

A “Great Green Wall” of planted trees, costing some 50 billion yuan (US$6.3 billion) since 1978, has been erected to protect northern cities from the rapidly spreading deserts. As a result, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) claimed that desertification slowed from 10,400 square kilometers annually late last century to about 3,000 square kilometers a year since 2001. 

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Deserts now cover almost a fifth of the PRC’s territory, according to the Ministry of Land and Resources, and the area threatened by desertification amounts to more than one-quarter of its landmass. 

The PRC’s dust bowl is now the largest area in the world where productive land is being converted into desert. The gains made against the tides of sand are tiny compared with the environmental losses during the past 26 years of breakneck economic growth. Rapid industrialization and sprawling cities have eaten up farmland and water resources, compounding an already severe problem of scarce arable land. An explosion in the timber and furniture business has led to ferocious cutting of trees, exposing more and more vulnerable land to the encroaching sands. 

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While PRC is the worst affected, the spread of deserts is now felt much beyond its borders. Since late 1990, sandstorms have also ravaged South Korea, Japan and even the United States. A prolonged drought in northwestern PRC has aggravated the problem, making it easier for the dry soil to be blown away by strong winds.

PRC Government officials pledged to work with neighboring countries to combat desertification. An overall plan for sandstorm control in Northeast Asia has been developed jointly by the PRC, Japan, the Republic of Korea and Mongolia. “The plan includes atmosphere monitoring and ground soil control,” says Li Tuo, head of the SFA's sand control office. “It will be implemented as soon as international funding is available.” 

The PRC’s battle against deserts goes back hundreds of years, and the country may never be able to completely tame the sandstorms. So far environmentalists have managed to reduce the number of sandstorms that hit Beijing in the spring. There were an average of 24 storms a year during the 1990s, according to the UN Environment Program, but in the past two years there have been just three or four. 

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The Great Green Wall scheme, which pays farmers financial incentives for every hectare of covered area, is both expensive—the SFA says the PRC plans to invest 700 billion yuan over the next 50 years to plant trees and vegetation and cover 73 million hectares—and not necessarily sustainable. 

Some forestation projects have planted trees in desert areas where they would have no hope of surviving. Meanwhile, a serious problem of overgrazing remains under tackled. 

The economic reforms of 1979, which deregulated agriculture, have prompted many farmers to increase the size of their herds. Nowadays the PRC’s livestock population numbers 339 million and their grazing is stripping the grass in the north and northwest at staggering speed. 

The government has responded by imposing selective bans on grazing and logging and has tried to improve irrigation. But unless they reduce the numbers of their livestock, desertification will be unstoppable.