Mongolia:Tree-planting to End Desertificationby | 20-06-2011 13:26 |
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Below is an article published by The Star: As a child growing up in Inner Mongolia, Han Yu was surrounded by breathtaking nature. ¢¯The scenery was beautiful. There were lots of trees. Even though you can see sand dunes, there were still different trees fronting the dunes,¢¯ says the farmer, now 54. Today, the landscape could not be more different. The views of galloping horses and moving herds in rolling grass meadows are long gone, replaced by barren sandy plains. Yu bears witness to the sea of sand washing over his farm, and those of his neighbours: ¢¯In the 1960s and 70s, we had to increase food production to feed the population so trees were felled and the grassland slowly diminished. By the mid-80s, we began to see the desert expanding.¢¯ The sand dunes of central Asia are marching outwards unrelentingly. In Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a third of the land now lay wasted. China¢¯s third largest province, it is fighting severe desertification, much like the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Heilongjiang and Hebei. Over-grazing, expanding farms and population pressure, coupled with drought and the freezing and thawing of iced soil, have steadily turned once fertile grasslands into sandy plains. In a 2006 report to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, China declared that 2.63 million sqkm ? 27% of its land ? is covered by desert, compared with 18% in 1994. Its grasslands have shrunk by 15,000sqkm annually since the early 1980s. The loss of land and ensuing economic activities is costing the country US$6.5bil (RM22.7bil) annually. As farmers abandon parched lands, rural poverty has worsened. And each spring, dust and sand are whipped up by the winds to form the ¢¯Yellow Dragon¢¯, a choking cloud that engulfs China¢¯s northern cities, causing respiratory and eye infections among millions. As the sandstorm drifts along, it binds with pollutants from factories and coal plants, creating a toxic plume that spreads as far as North and South Korea, Japan and even North America. *source : www.unpo.org |
