China 'At War' with Advancing Deserts

by Lester R. Brown

China is now at war. China's Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 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. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China.

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 US, 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 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. 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. The entire world has a stake in China's winning the war with the advancing deserts given its economic leadership role. 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, or the deserts that are marching eastward and could eventually occupy Beijing.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Earth Policy Institute. For more information go to www.earth-policy.org

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