China's desertification is growing worse.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Environmental Intelligence

The world's most populous country is losing ground, literally, in its long-running battle to save farmland from drying up and turning to dust. The problem is not new, but recent signs indicate that attempts to stem the loss may actually be making it worse. In November 2002, NASA's Terra satellite observed an enormous dust storm moving over northeastern China toward the Korean peninsula and the Pacific. It was a replay of a dust cloud that blew off China a year earlier and carried enough mass to briefly darken the sky over North America. Giant dust storms have become recurring signs of an ongoing stripping of soil from land that has been overgrazed or eroded, as well as from the Gobi Desert and other arid regions of the country.

Desertification evidently has been eroding China's agricultural base for millennia, according to researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science, the University of Western Australia, and the University of Arizona, who recently published a finding that human activities have expanded the desert in northern China southward by 300 kilometers over the past 3,000 years. In the past 50 years, desertification has accelerated, as the country's growing population has intensified the demand for crop productivity and led to a depletion of soil and irrigation water on marginal land. The amount of land...