Years of hard work and determination are finally paying off with the announcement that the area is at last winning the battle against encroaching desert.

Some 400,000 hectares of sand in the Maowusu Desert in Shaanxi Province have been brought under control thanks to organized grass and tree planting.

"In the past 15 years, local people in Yulin have planted forests each with an area of more than 670 hectares in the desert. Four forest belts with a length of 1,500 kilometers are now growing, which stops the flowing sand and improves the ecological environment," said Lu Xuebin, general engineer of the Forestry Bureau of Yulin, a city in northern Shaanxi Province.

Forest-grass coverage has increased from 0.9 percent to 25 percent in Yulin, and the city is now witnessing desertification in reverse. Sandstorm frequency has fallen from 30 days a year in the 1970s to less than 10 in recent years, the general engineer said.

"We used to suffer from sand which came into our houses with the wind some years ago and we even thought we would have to leave the city because of it. But now we enjoy a better environment that attracts many birds to our city, with clean water in the river and green trees along the river and roads," said Guan Zexi, a 64-year-old Yulin resident.

The Maowusu Desert is between the southern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and northern Shaanxi, and covers more than 32,000 square kilometers of barren land which nibbled away at all sides and gradually increased the area of desert.

Most of the desert here was flowing sand, covering some 573,333 hectares around Yulin city, which is the capital of Yulin Prefecture.

Yao Zhongxin, 70-year-old researcher at the Shaanxi Provincial Anti-desertification Research Institute, said the desert was some 500 meters from Yulin city 40 years ago, but now the sand had been pushed back and cannot be seen within 50 kilometers of the city.

Shaanxi, a northwest inland province which extends across two major basins of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, suffers from terrible soil erosion and desertification.

Yulin has been forced to move its urban centre south three times to escape the sand in history, Yao said.

Shaanxi has been making more efforts to improve its environment and its forest-grass coverage rate increased from 28 percent in the 1990s to 31 percent in 2004, according to official provincial sources.

A report issued by the Shaanxi Provincial Forestry Bureau in June shows that the area of desert in Shaanxi has fallen by 275,000 hectares since 1999.

"From next year to 2010, the province will aim to plant another 450,000 hectares of trees and control soil erosion, in a bid to basically stop desert expansion," Vice-Governor Wang Shousen said.

(China Daily July 26, 2005)