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| May 16, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
|  | China Wilderness to reclaim farmland By Zhang Jing BEIDAHUANG, China - Farms are now ubiquitous sights here, but not too long ago, this vast expanse of land bordering Russian Siberia was known as China's Great Northern Wilderness. That was when much of Beidahuang, in the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang, was covered with marshes and swamps. During the early 1950s up to the late 1970s, however, a huge swath of these wetlands was reclaimed by young soldiers and teenage revolutionaries and turned into farmland. The work was backbreaking, but even up until a few years ago, people were still bent on getting more areas of Beidahuang to yield produce. Today, reclamation efforts for food production have stopped here. Moreover, the Heilongjiang Land Reclamation Bureau has announced that 180,000 hectares of Beidahuang's cultivated land would be reconverted to forest, pasture and wetlands. As authorities and experts explain it, the move is being made in an effort to reverse the destruction wrought by decades of aggressive agricultural development. ''Wetlands are vitally important in the ecological sense in that they can act as enormous sponges to absorb, hold and slowly release water that would otherwise cause flooding,'' says Zhuang Guotai, director of the Nature Conservation Department of the State Environmental Protection Agency. ''They also purify the water and influence local climate.'' In the last 50 years, however, wetland areas here have been reduced to 1.48 million hectares - barely one-fourth the original size, says Liu Xingtu, deputy director at the Wetlands Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Trees were also felled by the tens of thousands to pave the way for reclamation in the western part of the Great Wilderness, 15 to 20 percent of which happens to be hilly. Soil erosion soon followed as rain cut thousands of gullies on sloped land. Experts now estimate that wind and water erosion have deprived the reclaimed area of 2 million hectares of 15 percent of its fertile black topsoil. Adds Zhuang: ''With wetlands greatly reduced, parts of the reclaimed land have become arid. This contributed to the severity of the 1998 floods along the Songhuajiang river basin in Heilongjiang province.'' But as late as the 1990s, provincial authorities were still committing what can only be described as geo-botanical follies. Between 1995 and 1997, for instance, some provincial government leaders had the idea of selling 30-year-long land-use rights for wasteland to developers at bargain prices. Foreign and domestic companies rushed to take advantage of the offer of less than 15 yuan (less than $2) per hectare. Zhang Xiangyuan, director of the Planning Committee of the Heilongjiang Land Reclamation Bureau, says trees in his hometown - Binxian County - were cut down as part of the development. But he also observes that ''excessive agricultural development brought strange weather. We had hailstorms as late as October''. Other consequences included the moving away of wetland natives like the white stork. The local population of red-necked cranes also dropped dramatically from 309 in 1984 to just 65 in 1995. In December 1998, a new provincial administration reversed its predecessor's decision reclaim the Beidahuang wilderness. It also decreed that the wetlands were in need of protection. Two months ago, it unveiled its back-to-nature program which will run for about five years and will see some 33,000 hectares of land being ''naturalized'' annually. Last year, the Heilongjiang Land Reclamation Bureau also invested 400,000 yuan ($48,300) in wetland protection. It will put in another 1 million yuan ($120, 800) in the same effort this year while the State Environmental Protection Agency has invested 750,000 yuan ($90,580). At the same time, the provincial bureau has set up 16 nature reserves, covering 6.1 percent of Beidahuang. Scattered in between the farms here, the reserves are aimed at protecting swamps and their inhabitants - from microbes, to fish, to birds. Some conservationists say such moves are coming in too little, and perhaps a bit late. But they concede that, nevertheless, they are steps in the right direction, at last. Indications are that sufficient supply of food, at an annual increase of 1 billion kilograms, has made it possible to reconvert farmland to its original forested, pastured or wetland state. Advances in science and technology has also enabled farmers here to make an operational shift from quantity to quality farming, thereby also making the need for more reclaimed land less pressing. But some of those who participated in the transformation of Beidahuang decades ago cannot help but recall what they had to put up with to tame the Great Wilderness. Recounts a 50-year-old woman, who made the train ride north into the middle of nowhere in 1970 and stayed here for nine years: ''Life was hard. I remember once that it was so cold my quilt froze and got stuck to the wall.'' Farmers who have suddenly found themselves out of work because of the provincial administration's decision are also unlikely to laud the current efforts. But Zhang Xiangyuan says, ''Most farmers here are ex-soldiers and they're adept at picking up new skills.'' Besides, he says, many of those who became jobless have found employment in service industries and construction projects. Meanwhile, the wetland protection program here has been gaining support from groups based in the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden and the United Kingdom. An ecological training program for local nature reserve protection began in May, with Japanese funding. (Inter Press Service) | |||||||||
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