China plants trees to hold back desertification

By Nick Mulvenney

DUOLUN COUNTY, China (Reuters) - Until giant sand dunes swallowed his home, Deng Baogui was a shepherd and wheat farmer in an Inner Mongolian village where his family had lived for three generations.

Fortunately for Deng, whose plight might have easily been ignored, the desertification which made it nearly impossible for him to eke out a living also fuelled the spring-time dust storms that blow through Beijing, leaving tonnes of sand on the streets.

Seven years ago, with the desert creeping south at the rate of 3 km (2 miles) a year and the dust storms getting worse, the Chinese government decided to act and the solution was typical of a country where the Great Wall stands as the ultimate grand project.

It began building a "Green Great Wall", a 700-km (435 mile) barrier of trees and enclosed grassland which will stretch across Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Shanxi provinces by 2010.

Deng's entire village -- whose 478 residents are all Han Chinese -- were relocated by the government to make room for the green barrier which Beijing hopes will hold back the desert.

"In our hearts we were reluctant to move because we were nostalgic. It's not easy to leave the place I was born and grew up," said the 50-year-old, standing in the living room of the four-room brick house where he now lives.

"But it was getting very hard to earn a living. The government came again and again over half a year to try and convince us," he told reporters on a government-organized trip for foreign media.

Desertification is no longer just a problem for China and the thick yellow dust of the sand storms now reaches as far as South Korea, Japan and at times even the United States and Canada.

The award of the 2008 Olympics to Beijing in 2001 gave further impetus to the project, officials said, even if dust storms never hit the capital in August when the Games will be held.

In 2000, Deng's entire village was cleared out and its residents moved 20 km south to the new village of Fuquan. They were provided with houses, a well, a communal toilet, 2.5 mu (0.411 acres) of land each and a barn to store their produce.

Deng, who lives with his wife, daughter, son and daughter-in-law, said their annual household income was now 10,000 yuan, many times what they made in the hardest years of the late 1990s.

They retain ownership of the 10.5 mu (6 acres) of land where their old home stood and tend the trees that now grow there.

Most importantly, Deng says, transport is much easier without having to negotiate through the sand. His grandchildren can attend school and medical care is within reach.

OVERGRAZING

Fuquan is in Duolun county, some 350 km north of central Beijing and close to the site of 13th century Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan's summer place Xanadu.