http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0126-07.htm
Published on Sunday,
January 26, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
'Ecological Meltdown': Huge Dust Cloud
Threatens Asia
by Geoffrey Lean in Washington
Gigantic dust clouds swirling over China are threatening the
world's most populous country with the first-ever "ecological
meltdown", experts here warn.
The clouds - which
stretch for thousands of miles over Asia and
have even reached across the Pacific to North America - are rising
from a rapidly growing dust bowl in northern China that far outstrips
the notorious one in the United States in the 1930s.
It threatens to drive
up the price of food and greatly increase
starvation worldwide, and could lead to tens of millions of desperate
Chinese environmental refugees.
"No
country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe on the
scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," says Lester
Brown,
president of the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington.
"Merely
grasping its dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical
challenge."
Dust storms have been
recorded in China for at least 2,700 years,
but they are now increasing alarmingly both in size and in number.
The Chinese Meteorological Agency says there were just five major
storms in the country in the whole of the 1950s. This rose to
23
in the 1990s. But the first two years of this decade have almost
equaled this figure already, with 20.
The storms - which
peak in late winter and early spring - can blot out
daylight in Beijing and other cities, make it hard for millions
of people
to breathe and destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of crops.
They
have closed schools and airports in South Korea and Japan, and
caused
a Korean car factory to shrink-wrap its vehicles as soon as they
come
off the production line to stop them being spoiled.
They have even occasionally
crossed the Pacific: one in April 2001
covered the west of North America from Canada to Arizona with
dust.
The clouds
sweep up millions of tons of precious topsoil from Chinese
fields and pastures. Gone in a single day, the soil will take
centuries
to replace. But this is just the most dramatic symptom of the
accelerating
spread of deserts across the country, which is home to nearly
one in
every four people on the planet.
Between 1994 and 1999,
the country's Environmental Protection Agency
reports, the Gobi Desert expanded by 20,240 square miles, to within
just 150 miles of Beijing, New, smaller, areas of desert are erupting
all over the country. In all, this "desertification"
is affecting
40 per cent of the country's land. Partly as a result, harvests
- which more than quadrupled between 1950 and 1998 - have fallen
sharply, even as China's population and appetite grow.
In Ganzu province alone,
some 4,000 villages are facing being
submerged by drifting sands, and the Earth Policy Institute believes
that throughout the country tens of millions of people may be
forced
off their land, dwarfing the migrations of the "Okies"
from the
American dust bowl.
The institute blames
"over-cultivation, overgrazing, over-cutting
and over-pumping" for the escalating catastrophe. Marginal
land is
being increasingly pressed into cultivation, but quickly turns
to dust under the strain. The country's 290 million sheep and
goats strip the vegetation off grazing lands. Cutting down forests
removes the trees that bind soil to the ground. And excessive
pumping of water from underground aquifers dramatically lowers
water tables, drying out the earth.
China is belatedly
trying to get to grips with the crisis. It is
planting 26 million acres - a tenth of its grain-growing area
- with trees. But many die because the soil is already too thin;
and, say critics, too many are being planted around Beijing so
as
to try to "green" the city - and clean the air - before
the
2008 Olympics.
As the crisis continues,
Mr Brown predicts, the world will soon
feel the pinch. So far China has compensated for its falling
harvests by eating stocks, but soon it will have to buy massive
amounts of grain on world markets. He warns: "Grain prices
could
double - impoverishing more people in a shorter period of time
than any event in history. It would create a world food economy
dominated by scarcity rather than by surpluses, as has been
the case over most of the last half a century."
© 2003 Independent
Digital (UK) Ltd
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