Growing ... Growing ... Gone

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Overpumping is a short-term solution that creates a dangerously deceptive illusion of food security — it supports a growing population while almost ensuring a future drop in food production. The water demand growth curve over the last 50 years looks like the population growth curve, except that it climbs more steeply. While world population growth was doubling, water use was tripling.

Farmers today are the first to face widespread aquifer depletion and the loss of irrigation water.

ECOLOGICAL MELTDOWN IN CHINA

In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the Earth's ecosystems, China is on the leading edge. More than 1 billion people and 400 million cattle, sheep and goats weigh heavily on the land.

Like many other countries, China is exceeding the carrying capacity of its ecosystem -- overplowing its land, overgrazing its rangelands, overcutting its forests and overpumping its aquifers. In its determined effort to be self-sufficient in grain production, it cultivated highly erodible land in the arid northern and western provinces, land that is vulnerable to wind erosion.

While overplowing now is partly remedied by paying farmers to plant their grain land in trees, overgrazing is destroying vegetation and increasing wind erosion. China's cattle, sheep and goat population more than tripled from 1950 to 2002.

The United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle, while China has 106 million. For sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million versus 298 million. Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land's protective vegetation. The wind does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert.

China is now at war. Like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China's territory each year.

China's expanding ecological deficits are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove millions of tons of topsoil in a single day -- soil that can take centuries to replace.

For the outside world, these storms draw attention to the dust bowl forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left residents of Seoul literally gasping for breath.

The U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2.5 million 'Okies' and other refugees to leave the land, many of them heading west from Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas to California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and dur ing the 1930s, the U.S. Population was only 150 million -- compared with 1.3 billion in China today. Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China's may measure in the tens of millions. As a U.S. embassy report, "The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia" noted, "Unfortunately, China's 21st-century Okies' have no California to escape to at least not in China.""

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