China plans to join forces with neighboring countries in a drive
to combat sandstorms, Qu Guilin, director of the department of
International Cooperation under the State Forestry Administration
(SFA), said at a press conference on the sidelines of the
International Conference on Women and Desertification, which opened
in Beijing yesterday.
The three-day international conference is jointly sponsored by
the UNCCD Secretariat, together with the governments of China,
Algeria and Italy, and focuses on the role of women in combating
desertification. It is one of several major conferences taking
place to mark the 2006 International Year of Deserts and
Desertification (IYDD).
Experts in the fields of gender issues and sustainable
development, representatives of civil society, as well as
high-level country representatives and other eminent personalities
gathered to share experiences and seek ways of empowering women as
an effective means to counter land degradation and rural
poverty.
Liu Tuo, head of the SFA's sandy land control office, said
China, Japan, South Korea and Mongolia have jointly worked out a
plan for sandstorm control in Northeast Asia, which they hope will
counter the increasing threat of an environmental disaster in the
region.
"The plan includes atmosphere monitoring and ground soil
control," he said.
"It will be implemented as soon as international funding is
available."
To date, China has cooperated with many other nations in the
fight against desertification and land degradation, a global
ecological problem which affects two-thirds of the world's
countries, with a fifth of the global population suffering as a
result of its affects including sandstorms and poverty.
Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu, addressing the conference, said:
"The solution to the difficult problem of desertification requires
the joint efforts of the international community."
As a responsible country and a permanent and reliable world
partner, China will make a concerted effort to promote
international cooperation in combating desertification, he
said.
Hui made it clear that the government was committed to working
with the international community to preserve the world's delicate
environment.
Meanwhile, a leading agricultural expert said China's vast
tracts of farmland must not be neglected in the battle against
sandstorms.
Dusty conditions plagued a large part of northern China this
spring with a particularly heavy dust storm hitting Beijing on
April 16, during which 330,000 tons of dust fell on the
capital.
Li Hongwen, a professor from the China Agriculture University,
said a large part of the dust was not actually sand, which is said
to blow in from the deserts of Inner Mongolia, but soil from farms around the
capital.
Li and his colleagues collected soil samples from farms in the
suburbs of Beijing and neighboring Hebei Province, as well as dust from the
deserts of Inner Mongolia.
Only extremely small particles of dust could be blown to Beijing
from Inner Mongolia. Li found that the granules of the dust falling
in Beijing were much larger than desert sand meaning the majority
was from nearby farms and not the desert.
In reaction to this problem the Ministry of Agriculture is now
promoting "conservation tillage", an innovative method of
cultivation that challenges traditional methods that Chinese
farmers have used for thousands of years.
"Conservation tillage" differs from traditional plowing in that
crop remains are left in the soil, which decompose and act to bind
the soil, thereby reducing the affect of wind and water erosion, Li
explained.
Beijing yesterday announced its plan for "conservation tillage"
to become mandatory in three years.
By 2008, 153,000 hectares of Beijing's farmland will be
cultivated this way.
(China Daily, China.org.cn May 30, 2006)