The Sands Reclaim North Central China's Venture Into Farming - NYT

China's own favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, surely would have warned against letting two mighty enemies, the Tengger and the Badain Jaran, form a united front. Yet a desert pincer is squeezing this struggling oasis town, and China's long campaign to cultivate its vast arid northwest is in retreat.

An ever-rising tide of sand has claimed grasslands, ponds, lakes and forests, swallowed whole villages and forced tens of thousands of people to flee as it surges south and threatens to leave this ancient Silk Road greenbelt uninhabitable. Han Chinese women here cover their heads and faces like Muslims to protect against violent sandstorms. Farmers dig wells down hundreds of feet. If they find water, it is often brackish, even poisonous. Chinese leaders have vowed to protect Minqin and surrounding towns in Gansu Province. The area divides two deserts, the Badain Jaran and the Tengger, and its precarious state threatens to accelerate the spread of barren wasteland to the heart of China.

The national 937 Project, set up to fight the encroaching desert, estimated in April that 1,500 square miles of land, roughly the size of Rhode Island, is buried each year. Nearly all of north central China, including Beijing, is at risk. Expanding deserts and a severe drought are also making this a near-record year for dust storms carried east in the jet stream. Sand squalls have blanketed Beijing and other northern cities, leaving a stubborn yellow haze in the air and coating roads, buildings, cars and lungs. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao traveled to the northwest in May to offer aid to drought-stricken farmers and order provincial officials to supply more water to Minqin.

But while local officials have tried grandiose projects to rescue the outpost, environmentalists say it will probably have to be at least partly abandoned and returned to nature if the regional ecology is to be restored. "We must find ways to live with nature in some kind of balance," said Chai Erhong, an environmentalist and writer who lives in Minqin. "The government mainly wants to control nature, which is what did all the harm in the first place."

EDIT

http://www.ecoearth.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=57208

...to hold back the desert. Sounds like a crazy New Age thing, but the other name for it is 'poop and stomp' reclamation. Basically, using the natural symbiotic relationship between cattle herds and grasslands to put down a new layer of bio-matter on top of the sand, eventually creating new grassland.

Here's one site about this that a lot of other sites seem to link to:
http://managingwholes.com/index.php

Cattle hooves and cattle poop seem to be very powerful tools when growing new grassland, IF done correctly (though if managed improperly, will make things worse). I just started reading about this (new, yet old) practice recently, and it sounds very promising (especially since it's entirely low tech).

However, in any case, it's ridiculous to try to grew cotton in the desert...

Not that they actually DID anything about it.

...have you ever run across this 'poop and stomp' reclamation technique before? (mentioned in my above post).

I was initially very skeptical when reading about it -- anything that states that cattle farming (if done properly) can help the environment earns a healthy dose of skepticism from me -- but when framed in terms of simulating the natural action of wild herds on grasslands, it seems as though it might be a good idea.

From what I've read, it seems to be a valid, ie., not 'Monsanto-sponsored', way of reclaiming otherwise depleted/desertified land, but I keep looking for the 'hitch'. :shrug:

I was thinking about posting a new thread about it sometime to get some other opinions, but here in this one would be just fine.

They failed to mention global climate change as a contributing factor.

Clearly there were other factors, but I think the composition of the atmosphere may have something to do with it too.