By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Jun 8 2006 (IPS)

China is claiming a partial victory in slowing the spread of encroaching deserts but has admitted that the centuries-old war to stop the sands eating up farmland will probably never be won completely.

The approaching 2008 Olympic Games, which Beijing has promised will be “green”, has inspired the government to launch ambitious, expensive programmes to combat desertification.

A ‘Great Green Wall’ of planted trees, costing some 50 billion yuan (6.3 billion U.S. dollars) since 1978, has been erected to protect northern cities from the rapidly spreading deserts. As a result, desertification slowed from 10,400 sq km annually late last century to about 3,000 sq km a year since 2001, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) claimed last week.

“China’s anti-desertification work has made major progress,” Zhu Lieke, the deputy head of SFA, said at a press conference. “It has effectively improved agricultural production conditions. But although there had been certain success, the desertification situation is still very serious.”

Deserts now cover almost a fifth of China’s territory, according to the Ministry of Land and Resources and the area threatened by desertification amounts to more than one-quarter of its landmass.

“When we talk about China’s dust bowl, I see an ancient civilisation being squeezed by growing deserts from the interior and rising seas from the coast,” says Lester Brown, a U.S. environmentalist and president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

China’s dust bowl is now the largest area in the world where productive land is being converted into desert, according to Brown, who spoke to IPS during his visit to Beijing last week.

The gains made against the tides of sand are tiny compared with the environmental losses during the past 26 years of breakneck economic growth. Rapid industrialisation and sprawling cities have eaten up farmland and water resources, compounding an already severe problem of scarce arable land. An explosion in the timber and furniture business has led to ferocious cutting of trees, exposing more and more vulnerable land to the encroaching sands.

Desertification annually costs China more than 8.4 billion yuan in direct economic losses, according to official media. The United Nations, however, reports the annual economic toll of desertification in China to be 6.5 billion U.S. dollars.

Its impact is most acutely felt in the driest areas in the west of the country, which are also among the poorest. The government estimates that the livelihoods of 400 million people are threatened by the encroachment of the Gobi, Taklimakan and Kumtag deserts.

While China is the worst affected, the spread of deserts is now felt much beyond its borders. Since late 1990, sand storms have also ravaged South Korea, Japan and even the United States. A prolonged drought in northwestern China has aggravated the problem, making it easier for the dry soil to be blown away by strong winds. “Top soil is one of China’s biggest environmental exports,” says Brown.

Last week Chinese officials pledged to work with neighbouring countries to combat desertification. An overall plan for sandstorm control in Northeast Asia has been developed jointly by China, Japan, South Korea and Mongolia.

“The plan includes atmosphere monitoring and ground soil control,” Li Tuo, head of the SFA’s sand control office told the media. “It will be implemented as soon as international funding is available.”

China’s battle against the deserts goes back hundreds of years and the country may never be able to completely tame the sandstorms, environmental officials say. So far they have managed to reduce the number of sandstorms that hit Beijing in the spring, filling the air with dust and sand particles and turning the sky shades of yellow and orange.

There were an average of 24 storms a year during the 1990s, according to the UN Environment Programme, but in the past two years there have been just three or four.

Nevertheless, the intensity of the storms has increased with every year. On Apr. 16, Beijing was hit by a particularly heavy dust storm, which deposited 330,000 tonnes of dust in the capital, reported the ‘China Daily’ newspaper.

One problem, experts say, is that by focusing its efforts so strongly on sandstorms – which are but one symptom of the larger problem of land degradation, government efforts have been ineffective.

The Green Great Wall scheme, which pays the farmers financial incentives for every hectare of covered area, is both expensive – the SFA says China plans to invest 700 billion yuan over the next 50 years to plant trees and vegetation and cover 73 million hectares – and not necessarily sustainable.

Some forestation projects have planted trees in desert areas where they would have no hope of surviving. Meanwhile, a serious problem of overgrazing remains under tackled, say experts.

The economic reforms of 1979, which deregulated agriculture, have prompted many farmers to increase the size of their herds. Nowadays China’s livestock population numbers 339 million and their grazing is stripping the grass in the north and northwest at staggering speed.

The government has responded by imposing selective bans on grazing and logging and has tried to improve irrigation. But “unless they reduce the numbers of their livestock, there would be no stopping the deserts,” Brown said.

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