Update 26: August 5, 2003-6
Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute
China Losing War With Advancing Deserts
China is now at war. It is not invading armies
that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are
advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly,
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 the Gobi Desert expanded
by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999, an
area half the size of Pennsylvania. With the advancing Gobi now within
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 cancelled, 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 the dust that stings the 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 Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol) 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 entitled "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 just over 400 million are weighing heavily
on the land. Huge flocks of sheep and goats in the northwest are stripping
the land of its protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on a scale
not seen before. Northwestern China is on the verge of a massive ecological
meltdown.
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 for sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million
versus 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. (See data.)
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 U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 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 1930s 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 entitled "The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia"
noted, "unfortunately, China's twenty-first 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 remediation 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: either build costly proposed south-north water diversion projects
or battle the advancing deserts that are marching eastward and could eventually
occupy Beijing.
Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Earth Policy Institute
Lester R. Brown, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, forthcoming 2003).
Lester R. Brown, Janet Larsen, and Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts, The Earth Policy Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
Janet Larsen, "Deserts Advancing, Civilization Retreating," Eco-Economy Update, 27 March 2003.
Lester R. Brown, "World's Rangelands Deteriorating Under Mounting Pressure," Eco-Economy Update, 5 February 2002.
Lester R. Brown, "Dust Bowl Threatening China's Future,"
Earth Policy Alert, 23 May 2001.
From Other Sources
Wang Hongchang, Deforestation and Desiccation in China: A Preliminary Study (Beijing, China: Center for Environment and Development, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), 1999.
Wang Tao, The Process and Its Control of Sandy Desertification in Northern China, seminar on desertification in China, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Lanzhou, China: May 2002).
U.S. Embassy, Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia (Beijing: May 2001).
Hong Yang and Xiubin Li, "Cultivated Land and Food Supply in China," Land Use Policy, vol. 17, no. 2 (2000).
Yang Youlin, Victor Squires, and Lu Qi, eds., Global Alarm: Dust and Sandstorms from the World's Drylands (New York: United Nations, 2001).
LINKS
Chinese Academy of Sciences International Dust Storm Program
http://www.casbic.ac.cn/english/Dust/index.htm
Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat
Desertification (UNCCD)
http://www.unccd.int
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
http://www.fao.org
U.S. Department of Agriculture - Natural Resources Conservation
Service World Desertification Vulnerability Map
http://soils.usda.gov/use/worldsoils/mapindex/desert.html
U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Environment, Science, Technology
& Health Section
http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt