Violent sandstorms which were Sunday continuing their annual assault on Beijing could still be a potential blight to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, despite costly environmental efforts to halt the advance of the desert on the city, state press said.
The year's first sandstorm struck Beijing Friday with further windy cold fronts from the Mongolian steppe expected to shroud the capital in a yellow, dusty haze, China Meteorlogical Bureau forecasts said.
Beijing's annual spring dust storms have increasingly become a hot political topic, with the government pledging to improve the situation before the 2008 Games.
"I cannot say sandstorms won't occur in 2008," Yang Weixi, chief engineer of the Desertification Control Center of China's Ministry of Forestry told the Beijing Weekend publication.
"What we can do is to manage the man-made factors which cause sandstorms and the expansion of desertification," he said.
However, conditions beyond human control, like wind, drought and huge existing deserts, would make it impossible to get rid of the storms in a short time frame, he said.
The Chinese government has pledged 56.8 billion yuan (US$6.8 billion) to curb desertification and lessen sandstorms between 2002 and 2008. Beijing alone was due to spend some one billion yuan this year.
"The increase in financing will greatly improve the situation, but... it may take decades to see a gradual improvement," Jia Baoquan, of the China Forestry Research Institute told the weekly.
Chinese environmentalists raised alarm bells after a survey earlier this year found almost a third of the country's land mass is now desert, largely due to human economic activity, such as livestock overgrazing.
In the first six months of 2001, Beijing was hit by 18 sandstorms originating from Inner Mongolia, where 60 percent of the land is desert, the survey said.
National People's Congress lawmakers from Shanghai, Beijing and Inner Mongolia, who met in Beijing this month, have urged the government to set up a "green wall" of trees to block the dust storms.
"In addition to building grand stadiums, Beijing should first of all construct a green wall on its border with Inner Mongolia to assure the successful holding of the 2008 Olympic Games," Inner Mongolian delegate Ping Ziliang said, according to the Shanghai Star newspaper.
The vice president of the Geographical Society of China, Xu Shiyuan, warned that if the government failed to take action, sandstorms could blow as far as Shanghai, around 1,000 kilometres (625 miles) to the south, the paper said.
(Xinhua News Agency March 18, 2002)
