China: 'a global garbage dump'.

Photos

DSC00767.jpg

see larger image

uploaded by hunxue-er

• 

  uploaded by hunxue-er | add comment

• 

  uploaded by Langoustine | add comment

• 

  uploaded by hunxue-er | add comment

• 

  uploaded by hunxue-er | add comment

China's environment is in a mess!

Its ‘global factory might be fast becoming a global garbage dump’.

So said Pan Yue, vice-minister of China’s State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA). Strong words from such a high-profile official. He was giving a talk in front of western diplomats and business people. So maybe the Chinese government is finally admitting its mistake in pursuing economic growth, regardless of the ‘global garbage dump’ this creates.  The scale of this is now so large and so rapid that China can no longer hide it. 

The scale:

A third of the land is now desert, the worst record in the world. China is losing a million acres of productive land each year. Wang Toa, China’s leading desert scholar, says the land turning to desert has doubled from 1,560 square hectares annually in the fifties to 3,600 at the Millenium. In fifty years, 24,000 villages in north and west China have been abandoned as a result of the drifting sand and the people left bereft of their livelihoods. These waste lands create sand, dust and volatile hot air which the strong winds blow across the country, reaching as far as Los Angeles.

There used to be a couple of sandstorms each year. Now, there are thirty or forty. Wang Tao reckons these sandstorms may well displace tens of millions of Chinese people eventually. Zheng Yi (now an exile in the US) says that 95 percent of this degradation is due to human activity, especially intensive stock rearing and arable farming.  He also points to the drying up of China's rivers and lakes, and the severe pollution of those that remain. The pollution of China's waterways is sixteen times more than the world average, and three-quarters of China's major rivers no longer support fish life.

Napoleon once said that if China’s people could unleash its country’s economic potential, it would shake the world. 

China is clearly shaking the world! 

Farming:

More seriously it is shaking people in China too.

This ‘global garbage dump’ is making 190 million Chinese people sick from drinking the polluted water, since many of the urban aquifers are polluted, and people can neither drink nor fish in 75 percent of Chinese rivers. China dumps 41 percent of its waste water in the Yangtze River and the Yellow River has withered to little more than a trickle for part of each year.  Thirty percent of the water is even unfit to use for farming and the smoke from the coal powered stations also chokes Chinese people. In fact, 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China and the airborne particulates are six times higher in Beijing than in New York City. China’s forests, too,  are fast disappearing and its soils are in very bad shape, as a result of over-use.  People have tried to farm on arid land; they have polluted fifteen percent of the land through poor management and, above all, there are simply too many sheep, goats and cows chasing too little grass.  Since the break-up of China’s collective farms in the 1980s, the animal population has spiralled out of control.  For example, while the US has 9 million sheep and goats, China (on similar size grazing land) has 366 million of them.  This is devastating the protective vegetation in the north and western provinces, near the existing deserts.

Sand:

Su Rongxi, a local farmer in Hebei province, found himself overwhelmed by sand in his once fertile Fengning County Valley, It happened overnight (as Ron Gluckman describes it).  His house was almost buried by the sandstorm.  This occurred just 160 kilometres north of Beijing. No one knew where the sand came from.  Nor did they really know what to do about it or how to stop more sand arriving.  The grass has gone and the river stands dry.  But many other people in the north and west of China have been suddenly overwhelmed like this.  Local officials are unable to cope.  And the advice which Beijing offers seems useless.  The truth is there is little that can be done about the sand once it starts to overwhelm farms like this. The State Forestry Administration believes this devastation has hurt some 400 million farmers, many of whom are being turned into refugees.

Trees, trees, trees…

Beijing tends to tackle the symptoms without much understanding of the underlying causes.  Everywhere in China, there are trees being planted for the country had little of its original forests remaining when the Communists came to power in 1948.  They planted along railway lines, by the sides of motorways, in the towns, everywhere.  And 54 million hectares of new plantations have been created, the largest increase in the world.

But this is not enough to replenish the trees being lost. Professor Jiang Gaoming of the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Science argues that Beijing has gone overboard with planting Poplars.  They’ve planted them everywhere, even in tropical areas where he says they are inappropriate.  When he was a child in east China’s Shandong province, he says there were dozens of trees:  from catalpas to sweet gum, oriental arborvitae, pagoda trees, elms, chinaberry, chestnuts, walnuts, honey locust trees and lots more.  But they got pulled down and Poplars planted almost overnight. The Poplars are both unattractive and ecologically unsound. 

Why?  Profit!

There is a lucrative market for the cheap wood from Poplars in the cities, to make floor boards, cheap furniture, and for fitting out buildings.  It has created a huge new industry that adds to the pollution with its toxic chemicals.  Local officials like the idea:  it can bring them payoffs in many ways.  But the professor argues that these new artificial single-specie forests are very poor at retaining soil or water and the trees are not very productive since they require the constant use of fertilisers, and are vulnerable to pests and diseases.  Other countries got rid of their tree monocultures years ago.  The short life-span of Poplars means they do not fix the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  The plantations should, he says, contain a mixture of slow growing high-quality trees alongside the faster growing species, so that the harvesting of different trees can be done continuously, and the soil replenished over time. Other experts have shown that Poplars do little to stop the sandstorms and that this is the crucial part of the problem. 

Tackling this:

Any expert will tell you that there are five problems to be settled if these deserts are to be brought back to productive use. 

First, drastically cut down the numbers of sheep and goats, which is difficult to do now that farmers are their own bosses.  Sheep and goats can be replaced by cattle which get fed indoors on cornstalks, straw from the spring wheat crop, and the harvest of drought tolerant leguminous forage crop a bit like alfalfa. This helps to conserve the soil. 

Second, increase the protective cover by planting grasses like alfafa that  nodulates to produce nitrogen for the soil.  This soil has taken hundreds of years to produce and it cannot easily be improved.  The sand will only stabilise once the area gets covered with vegetation and the animals don’t eat away at the plants.

Third, plant trees of course. Everywhere in China, a red banner can be seen, proclaiming:  “Plant trees. Create forests. It’s good for the nation”.  This is partly because responsibility for tackling this land degradation lies primarily with the Ministry of Forests and they tend to think in terms of trees. The Chinese have, for instance, tried to reign in the Taklimakan Desert (an area as large as Germany) with a 25-year programme of planting jujube trees.  Forestry experts say that the scale of this has surpassed anything anyone has tried to do before. 

Fourth, the land needs to be planned with different kinds of protective cover including fast growing shrubs as well as wind breaks.  The damaged soil structure loses its ability to hold nutrients washed into it by the rains when they arrive, and the shrubs' roots need to retain the moisture in the soil to feed the plants in dry seasons.  But the land also needs the commitment and care of local people to ensure that these plants survive in such a fragile environment. China certainly has the technical knowledge as Wang Tao attests.  But politics has intervened.  SEPA is severely understaffed (according to Elizabeth Economy), yet the Ministry of Forests has almost as many staff as trees!  One official told Elizabeth:  “There needs to be a Department of Protective Plants in China’!

Fifth, involve local people. China needs their support.  In many areas, you can see forests that have been carefully planted but then allowed to wither through lack of irrigation.  China has always been good at mobilising people to carry out tasks for a day here and a day there.  In fact, in many parts of China, people are required to plant five trees each year.  No one thinks about who will water them so they survive.  Newly planted trees and shrubs need plenty of protection themselves if they to survive their early growth, and not get eaten by the goats or used for firewood.  But no one consults or wins over local opinion when forests are planned.

That is the problem with China’s top down government.  There are lots of experts in the corridors of power but they have no dealings with local farmers.  This is a rather similar story to the experts at the World Bank and other aid donors that make huge loans to developing countries, often following development fashions that change from time to time.  They too ignore local people. So we should not be too critical of China:  it’s only doing what the rest of the world does.  

But the pace and scale of China’s environmental problems are immense.  Every farm adviser knows that agricultural expertise is a to- and fro-ing process between farmers, researchers and advisers, with each listening to and talking with the others. Only collaborative work will suffice!  But that is almost impossible in china’s command economy.

Angry farmers:

The problem is the pent up anger and frustration of local people.  They have been cheated, forced out of livelihoods, their farms taken over for urban expansion, (one and a half million people lost their homes to the Olympics - see earlier story) and poorly relocated for the building of the china’s huge programme of dams .  

Just before the Olympics, there was a huge scare brought about by the sandstorms that descended on Beijing.  According to The Independent (Nov 7th 2007) millions of tons from the Gobi Desert were being dumped around Beijing. This is nothing new; but the size of the sand being dumped surprised people this time round. The then Premier Zhu Rongji worried publicly that China’s capital would be driven from Beijing because of the advancing desert.  He knew he needed to show some concern in order to avoid yet another protest locally.

Zhou Shengxian, China’s top environmental official, announced that there had been 51,000 pollution-related protests in 2005 (that is 1000 protests each week).  And citizen complaints are now increasing by 30 percent each year.  By 2007, they were around 450,000.  Few of them get resolved. So people take to the streets.  More recently, this social discontent has taken a new direction.  In an attempt to get the authorities to take notice, people in one town, opposed to the building of a new petro-chemical plant, sent out over a million mobile-phone text messages calling for a demo the following day, which was videoed and uploaded on youtube.  This sparked off further web sites joining in.  The city authorities did stay the construction of the plant, for a time. Elizabeth Economy says that the Chinese leadership is becoming increasingly fearful of the potential for broader based demands for political change. And that is why the 'experts' are wary of consulting local people who know exactly what is happening locally.

Investments:

China is doing more than any other country to tackle this devastation.  It is to invest over US$24 million in the next 10 years in creating an oasis large enough to protect 20,000 herdsmen from the sand storms in the Alxa Desert, the world's fourth largest.  About a quarter of the dust that storms across the whole of China comes from the Alxa Desert.  Yang Gensheng, a local biologist, says that this is like "transplanting a 'biological lung' in to Alxa Desert".  But he points out that this will reduce the dust storms by only 10 percent, returning just a part of desert back to life. The project will cover about 150,000 acres (roughly two thirds the size of Hong Kong) and the water will be drawn from the Yellow River, 80 miles away. China intends to do this by painstaking and meticulous work, learnt over many years of trial and error. They will plan about ten thousand acres of wind and sand-proof trees and hope to reclaim enough farmland to resettle 25,000 herdsmen from their nearby dried-out pastures.  But Wu Jingliang, head of the Alxa League, points out: "If the situation deteriorates anymore, the herdsmen will not survive in that desert area any longer”.

In spite of our persistent criticism that it rides roughshod over its population, China in fact achieves things – improvements – that we in full democracies could never manage.  SEPA: the organisation charged with looking after the country’s environment has ‘become a wellspring of China’s most innovative environmental policies’, according to Elizabeth Economy, with excellent talent working in the Agency. And the media in China regularly report on environmental issuers.  But, in spite of China having some of the best environment laws in the world, SEPA operates with only 300 full time staff. That is miniscule compared with the tasks it is required to carry out (the US has 16,000 in its agency).  As a result, it is barely able to enforce even ten percent of these laws.  Local authorities persistently flout the laws and no one seems to care.  Local authorities themselves often turn a blind eye to serious pollution problems, out of self interest (and the payoffs they receive from factories).  Officials may even have a direct stake in the factories that pollute.

According to the government, 42 million trees have been planted since 1982.  In 2007 alone, the effort involved 560 million people.  In the last phase China has announced that it intends to plant trees in an area of 170,000 square miles – just over the size of California – over a decade.    And in Zxinjiang, the western province, home of the world’s biggest deserts, two million trees have already been planted.  This is part of China’s plan to create more than a thousand ‘green walls’ that will fence off these deserts to protect against the sandstorms.  Jujube trees are especially suited to the harsh climate here, able to withstand the winter temperatures while thriving in scorching summers. As Howard French of the New York Times in its article of April 11, 2004 points out, few have answered the question – does it really work?  Regardless of the cost (or the results), China’s goal is to plant 35 million trees by 2050.

But Pan Yue warned in 2005: ‘The economic miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace’. 

Let us hope that he is wrong.

NOTE: There is a huge amount written on this topic:

Elizabeth Economy : The Great Leap Backward? Foreign Affairs, Sept 2007,                  The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenges to China's Future (book)       Benjamin Lim:  Deserts and Sandstorms over North China. Asain Journeys July 2008   He Qinglian:  Who is responsible for China's environment? China Rights Forum 2006   Liu Binyan, Perry Link:  A Great Leap Backward?  Foreign Affairs, Oct 2008              He Qinglian:  China's Pitfall (book)                                                                                     Clifford Coonan:  The gathering sandstorm:  encroaching desert, missing water Independent Nov 9th 2007                                                                                               Zheng Yi:  title to follow!