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August 5, 2003-6
Copyright © 2003 Earth Policy Institute
China Losing War With Advancing Deserts
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 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
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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
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