Regarding dust and drought, this shocking article:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=372786
Huge dust cloud threatens Asia
By Geoffrey Lean in Washington
26 January 2003
Gigantic dust clouds swirling over China are threatening the world's most
populous country with the first-ever "ecological meltdown", experts here warn.
The clouds – which stretch for thousands of miles over Asia and have even
reached across the Pacific to North America – are rising from a rapidly
growing dust bowl in northern China that far outstrips the notorious one
in the United States in the 1930s.
It threatens to drive up the price of food and greatly increase starvation
worldwide, and could lead to tens of millions of desperate Chinese
environmental refugees.
"No country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe on the scale
of the dust bowl now developing in China," says Lester Brown, president of
the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington. "Merely grasping its
dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical challenge."
Dust storms have been recorded in China for at least 2,700 years, but they
are now increasing alarmingly both in size and in number. The Chinese
Meteorological Agency says there were just five major storms in the
country in the whole of the 1950s. This rose to 23 in the 1990s. But the
first two years of this decade have almost equalled this figure already, with 20.
The storms – which peak in late winter and early spring – can blot out
daylight in Beijing and other cities, make it hard for millions of people
to breathe and destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of crops. They have
closed schools and airports in South Korea and Japan, and caused a Korean
car factory to shrink-wrap its vehicles as soon as they come off the
production line to stop them being spoiled.
They have even occasionally crossed the Pacific: one in April 2001 covered
the west of North America from Canada to Arizona with dust.
The clouds sweep up millions of tons of precious topsoil from Chinese
fields and pastures. Gone in a single day, the soil will take centuries to
replace. But this is just the most dramatic symptom of the accelerating
spread of deserts across the country, which is home to nearly one in every
four people on the planet.
Between 1994 and 1999, the country's Environmental Protection Agency
reports, the Gobi Desert expanded by 20,240 square miles, to within just
150 miles of Beijing, New, smaller, areas of desert are erupting all over
the country. In all, this "desertification" is affecting 40 per cent of
the country's land. Partly as a result, harvests – which more than
quadrupled between 1950 and 1998 – have fallen sharply, even as China's
population and appetite grow.
In Ganzu province alone, some 4,000 villages are facing being submerged by
drifting sands, and the Earth Policy Institute believes that throughout
the country tens of millions of people may be forced off their land,
dwarfing the migrations of the "Okies" from the American dust bowl.
The institute blames "over-cultivation, overgrazing, over-cutting and
over-pumping" for the escalating catastrophe. Marginal land is being
increasingly pressed into cultivation, but quickly turns to dust under the
strain. The country's 290 million sheep and goats strip the vegetation off
grazing lands. Cutting down forests removes the trees that bind soil to
the ground. And excessive pumping of water from underground acquifers
dramatically lowers water tables, drying out the earth.
China is belatedly trying to get to grips with the crisis. It is planting
26 million acres – a tenth of its grain-growing area – with trees. But
many die because the soil is already too thin; and, say critics, too many
are being planted around Beijing so as to try to "green" the city – and
clean the air – before the 2008 Olympics.
As the crisis continues, Mr Brown predicts, the world will soon feel the
pinch. So far China has compensated for its falling harvests by eating
stocks, but soon it will have to buy massive amounts of grain on world
markets. He warns: "Grain prices could double – impoverishing more people
in a shorter period of time than any event in history. It would create a
world food economy dominated by scarcity rather than by surpluses, as has
been the case over most of the last half a century." 30 January 2003
20:44
© 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
[snip]From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: digest mode - you'll hate it Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 17:09:22 -0600Digest really becomes frusterating and extremely bulky when so few people will actually refrain from copying out entire emails
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