Warming saps China's goal of taming deserts

By Michael Casey

updated 9:28 a.m. ET June 19, 2007

ZHENGXIN, China - Half a century after Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” brought irrigation to the arid grasslands in this remote corner of northwest China, the government is giving up on its attempt to make a breadbasket out of what has increasingly become a stretch of scrub and sand dunes.

In a problem that’s pervasive in much of China, overfarming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland.

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, said Wang Tao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Lanzhou. “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 Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, 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.

In Gansu province, authorities have ordered farmers to vacate their properties over the next 3½ 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.

“I don’t want to move,” said Chen Ying, 58, sitting in a sparsely furnished bedroom dominated by a red, wall-sized poster of Mao, the communist founding father who sought to catapult Chinese farming and industry into modernity with the so-called Great Leap Forward.

“But if we keep using the groundwater, it will decline,” said Chen. “We have to think about the next generation.”

It’s not just Chen’s home region that’s at risk.

One third of China is desert
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.

The policy is driven in part by concerns over food, as farmland yields not only to the deserts but also to pollution and economic development. China has less than 7 percent of the world’s arable land with which to feed 1.3 billion people — more than 20 percent of the world’s population. By comparison, the United States has 20 percent of the world’s arable land to feed 5 percent of the population.

But the initiative is also a tacit admission by the government that the effort to feed the country at all costs may have backfired.

Chen was just a child when the government turned the rugged grasslands on the edge of the Tengger into an oasis.

In the 1950s, as part of Mao's scheme to boost food production, the government built the Hongyashan Reservoir in Gansu province with the goal of irrigating nearly 1 million acres.

But over the past two decades, new reservoirs were built farther up the Shiyang River, sapping the Hongyashan Reservoir. It even dried up in 2004 and is only about half full today. Farmers responded by digging thousands of wells, causing the water table to drop hundreds of feet and the soil to become contaminated with salt.

Worried the desert could reach the city of Minqin, 35 miles away, authorities decided to return the land to its natural state.

“If the government does nothing, it is scared that the entire area will become a desert,” said Sun Qingwei, a desertification expert with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “There are alternative solutions like introducing new plant species or conserving water. But this is the quickest solution. The government can show the people they are doing something.”

Chen, a grizzled farmer who sports a Mao cap, blue coat and baggy, mud-spattered pants, has planted dozens of trees outside his home to prevent the desert dunes from overrunning his property. He also switched from wheat to less thirsty cotton and fennel.

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