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EARTH POLICY ALERT
Alert 2001-2
For Immediate
Release
May 23, 2001
Copyright Earth Policy Institute 2001
DUST BOWL THREATENING CHINA'S FUTURE
Lester R. Brown
On April 18, scientists at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) laboratory in Boulder,
Colorado, reported that a
huge dust storm from northern China had reached
the United States
"blanketing areas from Canada to Arizona with a layer of
dust." They
reported that along the foothills of the Rockies the mountains
were
obscured by the dust from China.
This dust
storm did not come as a surprise. On March 10, 2001,
The People's Daily
reported that the season's first dust storm-one of
the earliest on
record-had hit Beijing. These dust storms, coupled with
those of last year,
were among the worst in memory, signaling a
widespread deterioration of the
rangeland and cropland in the country's
vast northwest.
These huge dust plumes routinely travel hundreds of
miles to
populous cities in northeastern China, including Beijing,
obscuring the
sun, reducing visibility, slowing traffic, and closing
airports. Reports
of residents in eastern cities caulking windows with old
rags to keep
out the dust are reminiscent of the U.S. dust bowl of the
1930s.
Eastward moving winds often carry soil from China's northwest to
North
Korea, South Korea, and Japan, countries that regularly complain
about
dust clouds that both filter out the sunlight and cover everything
with
dust. Responding to pressures from their constituents, a group of 15
legislators from Japan and 8 from South Korea are organizing a
tri-national committee with Chinese lawmakers to devise a strategy to
combat the dust.
News reports typically attribute
the dust storms to the drought
of the last three years, but the drought is
simply bringing a
fast-deteriorating situation into focus. Human pressure
on the land in
northwestern China is excessive. There are too many people,
too many
cattle and sheep, and too many plows. Feeding 1.3 billion people,
a
population nearly five times that of the United States, is not an easy
matter.
In addition to local pressures on resources,
a decision in
Beijing in 1994 to require that all cropland used for
construction be
offset by land reclaimed elsewhere has helped create the
ecological
disaster that is now unfolding. In an article in Land Use
Policy,
Chinese geographers Hong Yang and Xiubein Li describe the
environmental
effects of this offset policy. The fast-growing coastal
provinces, such
as Guandong, Shandong, Xheijiang, and Jiangsu, which are
losing cropland
to urban expansion and industrial construction, are paying
other
provinces to plow new land to offset their losses. This provided an
initial economic windfall for provinces in the northwest, such as Inner
Mongolia (which led the way with a 22-percent cropland expansion),
Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Xinjiang.
As the
northwestern provinces, already suffering from
overplowing and overgrazing,
plowed ever more marginal land, wind
erosion intensified. Now accelerating
wind erosion of soil and the
resulting land abandonment are forcing people
to migrate eastward, not
unlike the U.S. westward migration from the
southern Great Plains to
California during the Dust Bowl years.
While plows are clearing land, expanding livestock
populations
are denuding the land of vegetation. Following economic reforms
in 1978
and the removal of controls on the size of herds and flocks that
collectives could maintain, livestock populations grew rapidly. Today
China has 127 million cattle compared with 98 million in the United
States. Its flock of 279 million sheep and goats compares with only 9
million in the United States.
In Gonge County in
eastern Quinghai Province, the number of
sheep that local grasslands can
sustain is estimated at 3.7 million, but
by the end of 1998, sheep numbers
there had reached 5.5 million, far
beyond the land's carrying capacity. The
result is fast-deteriorating
grassland, desertification, and the formation
of sand dunes.
In the New York Times, Beijing Bureau
Chief Erik Eckholm writes
that "the rising sands are part of a new desert
forming here on the
eastern edge of the Quinghai-Tibet Plateau, a legendary
stretch once
known for grass reaching as high as a horse's belly and home
for
centuries to ethnic Tibetan herders." Official estimates show 900
square
miles (2,330 square kilometers) of land going to desert each year.
An
area several times as large is suffering a decline in productivity as it
is degraded by overuse.
In addition to the direct
damage from overplowing and
overgrazing, the northern half of China is
literally drying out as
rainfall declines and aquifers are depleted by
overpumping. Water tables
are falling almost everywhere, gradually altering
the region's
hydrology. As water tables fall, springs dry up, streams no
longer flow,
lakes disappear, and rivers run dry. U.S. satellites, which
have been
monitoring land use in China for some 30 years, show that
literally
thousands of lakes in the North have disappeared.
Deforestation in southern and eastern China is reducing
the
moisture transported inland from the South China Sea, the East China
Sea, and the Yellow Sea, writes Wang Hongchang, a Fellow at the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences. Where land is forested, the water is held
and evaporates to be carried further inland. When tree cover is removed,
the initial rainfall from the inland-moving, moisture-laden air simply
runs off and returns to the sea. As this recycling of rainfall inland is
weakened by deforestation, rainfall in the interior is declining.
Reversing this degradation means stabilizing population
and
planting trees everywhere possible to help recycle rainfall inland. It
means converting highly erodible cropland back to grassland or woodland,
reducing the livestock population, and planting tree shelter belts
across the windswept areas of cropland, as U.S. farmers did to end dust
storms in the 1930s.
In addition, another
interesting option now presents itself-the
use of wind turbines as
windbreaks to reduce wind speed and soil
erosion. With the cost of
wind-generated electricity now competitive
with that generated from fossil
fuels, constructing rows of wind
turbines in strategic areas to slow the
wind could greatly reduce the
erosion of soil. This also affords an
opportunity to phase out the use
of wood for fuel, thus lightening the
pressure on forests.
The economics are extraordinarily
attractive. In the U.S. Great
Plains, under conditions similar to China's
northwest, a large advanced
design wind turbine occupying a tenth of a
hectare of land can produce
$100,000 worth of electricity per year. This
source of rural economic
regeneration fits in nicely with China's plan to
develop the
impoverished northwest.
Reversing
desertification will require a huge effort, but if the
dust bowl continues
to spread, it will not only undermine the economy,
but it will also trigger
a massive migration eastward. The options are
clear: Reduce livestock
populations to a sustainable level or face heavy
livestock losses as
grassland turns to desert. Return highly erodible
cropland to grassland or
lose all of the land's productive capacity as
it turns to desert. Construct
windbreaks with a combination of trees
and, where feasible, wind turbines,
to slow the wind or face even more
soil losses and dust storms.
If China cannot quickly arrest the trends of
deterioration, the
growth of the dust bowl could acquire an irreversible
momentum. What is
at stake is not just China's soil, but its future.
<end>
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