Eco-Economy Update 2003-6 Share with a friend or colleague.
For Immediate Release
Copyright Earth Policy Institute 2003
August 5, 2003
ds.
CHINA LOSING WAR WITH ADVANCING DESERTS
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update26.htm
Lester R. Brown
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 Mongol) 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 at
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update26_data.htm)
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.
# # #
This Update is adapted from Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a
Civilization in Trouble, being published September 10, 2003. Chapters 1 and
11 are online now for free downloading.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/index.htm
Additional data and information sources at
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update26_data.htm
or contact jlarsen@earth-policy.org
For reprint permissions contact rjkauffman@earth-policy.org
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