BEIJING - A giant dust bowl is forming across northern China, converting swathes of arable land to desert and triggering sandstorms whose impact carries across the Pacific, a leading environmentalist said on Tuesday.
Lester Brown, of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, said China was far from arresting the problem he attributed to overgrazing and falling water tables in the country whose landmass is already one-third desert. "There are huge areas there that were once productive grassland that are now desert," Brown told foreign correspondents. "It represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert anywhere in the world."
China, which is plagued by sandstorms every spring, has embarked on a campaign to plant billions of trees and says it is slowing the rate of desertification, but Brown said the problem was far from under control. "Here and there there are successful pilot projects, but overall we are not anywhere close to arresting this situation. The deserts are expanding," he said.
The number of livestock grazing had mushroomed since China began economic reforms in the late 1970s, and, with little management, the number of sheep and goats jumped to 339 million, compared with about 7 million in the United States. China has also said the sheer size of its deserts mean it will never completely tame the sandstorms that this spring covered the capital in brown dust, and left skies a murky yellow.
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