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  Straits Times 29 Jun 07
Desert invasion
Once a verdant oasis, Minqin county is now 95 per cent sandy wasteland - and what is left is on the verge of being engulfed by deserts
By Tracy Quek

MINQIN (GANSU PROVINCE) - FOR eight generations, farmer Wei Guangwei and his ancestors have fought against an onslaught of drifting sand.

Living on the edge of a desert, the Wei family has sown hundreds of tamarisk shrubs on the sandy plains encircling their flat-roofed house to prevent it and their village from being swallowed up by the advancing dunes. 'Without the plants to hold down the sand, our houses and crops would have been buried a long time ago,' said Mr Wei, 55, his sunburnt face lined like his furrowed field.

To irrigate his cotton and aniseed seedlings, which he harvests and sells for income, Mr Wei must fetch water every 10 days from a well located in a neighbouring village almost an hour away on foot. His wife, Madam Zhang Juhua, 52, toils alongside him, coaxing life out of the hard, thirsty ground.

A constant struggle against encroaching sands that invade farmland, sandstorms that blot out the sun and an acute anxiety about the dwindling water supply - this is what life is like for most farmers in Minqin, a county situated at the northern tip of Gansu province in China's north-west.

Once a verdant desert oasis nourished by offshoots of the Shiyang River, 95 per cent of Minqin's 16,000 sq km is now sandy wasteland. What remains is on the verge of being engulfed by the two vast deserts that hem it in on three sides - the Badain Jaran from the west and north, and the Tengger from the east.

Some have blamed excessive cultivation and grazing, a population spike during the 1950s and 1960s as well as the cities and 22 reservoirs upstream that divert most of Minqin's water for the county's severe land degradation and water shortage.

While the people who call this inhospitable place home acknowledge man's hand in the problem, they say they hold something else accountable as well.

Farmers attuned to the slightest changes in weather from their days spent outdoors swear that compared to a decade ago, winters are warmer and shorter, summers are unbearably hot, rain is increasingly rare and sands whipped up daily by gusts of wind threaten to blanket their homes and crops in ochre.

Farmer Tang Xinfu, 39, says he knows what is behind the shifts in weather. 'It is global warming. I watch the state television channel, and they have been talking about it. What they describe is exactly what we are experiencing,' says Mr Tang whose village, Shui Sheng, lies less than 10km from sandy desertified plains.

He is troubled about the future of his home: 'I am not sure how much time Minqin has left. The deserts seem to be getting closer every year.'

Desert crisis

A DESERT oasis situated on the lower reaches of the Shiyang River along China's ancient silk road, places in Minqin have names that speak of an abundance of water.

But visit villages such as Hu Qu (Lake Area) and Shui Sheng (Plentiful Water) today, and dried up stream and lake beds are the only evidence of wetter climes.

'It used to rain every two months when I was young. There used to be a big lake outside our house, and there were fish and wild ducks,' recalls Mr Ma Zhijin, 74, of Minqin's Guo Dong village. 'Now, we are lucky to have rain twice a year. The lake dried up 20 years ago, and sand is everywhere.'

Experts estimate that in the past five years, more than 100 sq km of Minqin's farmland has become desertified, and that sands surge forward by 8m to 10m each year.

What is happening in Minqin - home to 300,000 people, half of whom do not have enough water to meet their daily needs - is not unique in China's arid regions, although the county is among the most severely affected.

Desertification - the degradation of drylands due to climatic variations or unsustainable human activities such as overcultivation - affects 27 per cent of China's land mass, or some 2.6 million sq km. In addition, up to 3,000 sq km of land, five times the size of Singapore, is claimed by deserts each year.

Drylands are areas located on desert fringes which get almost no rainfall and suffer from high evaporation rates. Prime targets for desertification include much of China's arid western provinces, including Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Ningxia.

In China, several national projects to combat desertification have been launched, including a plan to rehabilitate desertified areas through reforestation and tree planting, with the ambitious goal of restoring 40 million sq km of degraded land by 2030.

The State Forestry Administration, which leads China's sand prevention and control work, says its efforts have slowed down the deserts, and in some areas, reversed the desertification trend.

However, there are those who question the long-term effectiveness of such a strategy. Climate change could undermine even superhuman efforts to rehabilitate degraded land, they contend.

Minqin environmentalist Chai Erhong, 45, observes: 'The local authorities plant trees because they look impressive. 'But as it gets hotter and drier, how will the plants survive? Few think about the long-term implications.'

One expert who has given it much thought is Professor Ci Longjun, 72, a leading researcher at the Chinese Academy of Forestry Sciences. She warns that climate change - in the form of higher temperatures, reduced precipitation and prolonged periods of drought - could seriously worsen desertification in much of China's arid regions.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body set up to establish a scientific consensus on the issue, temperatures in deserts could rise by an average of between 5 deg C and 7 deg C by the end of the century. Rainfall in deserts could decline by as much as 15 per cent.

Few have predicted how rising atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases will affect the global rate of desertification, but Prof Ci says there is a close link.

Should atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise by 1 per cent annually, bringing about a corresponding increase in surface temperatures, China's desertified areas could expand by 11 per cent by 2030. By 2056, it could grow by 13 per cent.

However, if the rise of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is kept to an annual 0.5 per cent, the rate of desertification drops dramatically - to a 4 per cent increase by 2030 and 7 per cent by 2056.

'The link between climate change and desertification is clear. If we want to change the present situation, we must find a way to control emissions,' Beijing-based Prof Ci told The Straits Times.

There are other pressing reasons to take action.

The social and economic costs of desertification - which renders arable land useless, contributes to water scarcity and famine, worsens poverty and displaces millions of people - is huge.

Nearly 400 million people, or 30 per cent of China's population, live in desertified areas. A large proportion subsist below the poverty line.

Desertification costs China some 54 billion yuan (S$10.8 billion) in direct economic losses a year. This accounts for 16 per cent of the overall damage of worldwide desertification.

Time running out

PLACING bowls on a table, Mr Tang fills them with water, a precious commodity in parched Minqin. The liquid, while clear, tastes slightly salty.

Mr Tang nods: 'This is the best we can get from our wells now. Years ago, water was much better.'

Deteriorating ground water is just one environmental scourge farmers in Minqin's 18 villages and small townships must grapple with.

After more than five decades, beginning in the early 1950s, of excessive water diversion upstream and extensive cultivation of water-guzzling crops such as melon seeds, corn and wheat, surface water in Minqin has vanished.

Desperate locals now rely on underground water. In the past decade, more than 10,000 wells have been dug, some extending to more than 300m underground.

The fast receding underground aquifers, coupled with warmer winters and drier springs, make it hard for surface vegetation to survive, and the bare soil is particularly vulnerable to desertification.

Among the direst predictions for Minqin is that it has at most 50 years before its lands become so degraded that the Badain Jaran and Tengger deserts converge. If this oasis town disappears, sand-laden winds from the north-west will sweep, unhindered by a green buffer, across the mainland and dump their load in Beijing and as far east as Japan, says Mr Chai, the environmentalist.

Already, violent sand storms batter Minqin 37 days out of a year. Residents have to put up with another 139 days of milder 'sandstorm weather' yearly.

Incomes have also dipped. Because of smaller yields and the cost of replanting crops destroyed by sandstorms, Mr Tang says his earnings from growing cotton and aniseed on his 5,300 sq m of land have fallen by half from a decade ago to less than 1,000 yuan a year now.

Faced with the growing environmental menace, Minqin's farmers say it is hard for them to hold on to hope. Many have already left for greener pastures in neighbouring provinces such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

It is estimated that over the past 15 years, 40,000 Minqin residents have fled. Farmer Wei Guangwei of Fuchenggou village, in a badly desertified area on Minqin's northern frontier, has watched his neighbours leave one by one. Where there was a lively community of 100 families a decade ago, now Mr Wei and his wife are the only ones

left. Mr Wei says: 'We are old, sick and have no relatives elsewhere. We will have to stick it out here.'

Straits Times 29 Jun 07
Native sons return to save their land
By Tracy Quek

MINQIN (GANSU PROVINCE) - THEY may have left Minqin years ago, but the desert and the toll it is taking on the place of their birth are problems that stay on their minds.

In Gansu province's Lanzhou city, 360km south of Minqin county, Mr Ma Junhe and Mr Han Jie-rong have joined forces to save their hometown.

It is not just talk. Last year, they and five other Minqin residents founded Rescue Minqin, a non-governmental group aimed at alleviating poverty and helping residents there beat the environmental odds.

Mr Ma, who was 19 when he left Minqin seven years ago, said: 'There is no industry to speak of in Minqin. People here rely on the land for their livelihood. So damage to the land is equal to economic devastation for them.'

Minqin farmers make 800 yuan (S$160) a year on average, a quarter of the 3,587 yuan per capita that other Chinese farmers earned last year. The group has attracted some 200 volunteers from all over China, who communicate via their website.

They are now brainstorming ideas which include how to better market and brand the local agricultural produce to boost earnings.

One other suggestion is to lobby the local authorities to set up a special pension scheme for affected farmers. The idea is to provide farmers with a safety net that will relieve some of their economic burden, making it easier to convince them to spend more time combating desertification by planting green belts.

Another civic organisation, Oxfam Hong Kong, has experimented with changing the land use patterns in Minqin. In a pilot project launched in 2003, it donated goats to families in two Minqin villages so that farmers rely less on their land for income.

The local government has responded to Minqin's plight by shutting wells to curb the extraction of groundwater and relocating entire communities in an effort to allow populated land to rehabilitate.

But this strategy has met with limited success. Locals joke that the government's motto of 'people leave, deserts recede' should be changed to 'people leave, deserts advance' to reflect the real situation.

Scientists say that to fight successfully against desertification, more resources must be put into research on how, and to what extent, climate change could impact the problem.

Professor Chen Fahu of Lanzhou University's Centre for Arid Environment and Paleoclimate Research, said such research is in the early stages in China. 'There is a realisation, but in terms of in-depth and comprehensive research into how climate change and desertification are linked, there is not enough,' he said. 'We need to learn more if we want to come up with effective solutions.'

Currently, much of the research on desertification focuses on human impact and related remedial action.

But the lack of scientific understanding is not stopping other Minqin locals such as Mr Xu Youshu from making it his mission to save the county. Mr Xu, 30, an agricultural products trader, said he is investing 9 million yuan in a project that will involve planting drought-resistant plants on 6.67 sq km of desert land in eastern Minqin.

The plants, including desert cistanche, will not only hold the migrating sands in place and reduce the occurrence of sandstorms, but are also a money-spinner. They can be used as ingredients in beauty products and in Chinese medicine. Mr Xu estimates that 667 sq m of crops are worth 1,500 yuan.

His motivation comes from the heart. Said Mr Xu, who was born in Jia He village in eastern Minqin: 'I made up my mind, as a Minqin native, that I cannot allow my hometown to disappear in my lifetime.'
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