Expanding deserts hurts farmers in China
24 June 2007
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In a problem that’s pervasive in much of China, over-farming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland. Authorities have ordered farmers here in Gansu province to vacate their properties over the next 3 1/2 years, and will replace 20 villages with newly planted grass in a final effort to halt the advance of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts.
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It’s not just Chen’s home region that’s at risk.
The relocation program is part of a larger plan to rein in China’s expanding deserts, which now cover one-third of the country and continue to grow because of overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and droughts.
The shifting sands have swallowed thousands of Chinese villages along the fabled Silk Road and sparked a sharp increase in sandstorms; dust from China clouds the skies of South Korea and has been linked to respiratory problems in California.
Since 2001, China has spent nearly $9 billion planting billions of trees, converting marginal farmland to forest and grasslands and enforcing logging and grazing bans.
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Throughout the province, treeless, wind-swept plains stretch for miles in all directions. Gone are the knee-high grasses and the Qingtu Lake, replaced by sands from the expanding Tengger and nearby Badain Jaran deserts and with soil scarred white from salt.
The only signs of civilization in many areas are the herds of sheep munching on thorn bushes, the clusters of mud and straw homes and the burial mounds. Billboards promoting the country’s one-child policy compete with those pushing slogans like “No Reclamation, No Overcultivation.”
Many communities have been emptied altogether, leaving behind crumbling homes and empty courtyards.
The battle against deserts is playing out across much of western China. Desertification has caused as much as $7 billion in annual economic losses, the China Daily reported.
Over the past decade, Chinese deserts expanded at a rate of 950 square miles a year, according to Wang Tao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Lanzhou.
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Expanding deserts have contributed to a nearly six-fold increase in sandstorms in the past 50 years to two dozen annually, Wang said.
Global warming will worsen the problem, as rising temperatures lead to widespread drought and melt most glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, depriving lakes and rivers of a crucial water source, according to the U.N.-funded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Hotter, drier land is more vulnerable to soil erosion, Wang said. “This is the same problem the United States faced in the 1930s with the dust bowl.”
Global warming also threatens to make a huge dent in grain production, which Brown said has already slipped from 432 million tons in 1998 to 422 million tons in 2006 because of desertification. At the same time, grain consumption has risen about 4.4 million tons a year to 418 million tons, in part because of rising demand for beef, chicken and pork.
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“We’re the last people,” Wei said. “It is lonely. It would be better if my son lived with us. But if he did, he wouldn’t be able to find a wife.”
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