NZSM Online

Get TurboNote+ desktop sticky notes

Interclue makes your browsing smarter, faster, more informative

SciTech Daily Review

Webcentre Ltd: Web solutions, Smart software, Quality graphics

Over The Horizon

Eroding Environments

Economic growth in China's pastoral regions has seriously degraded the environment, according to Massey University rural development expert Tony Banks.

Banks recently travelled to China at the invitation of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture to research the country's extensive pastoral system. His research area is the Xinjiang region of north-west China. Xinjiang is one of China's largest and least-densely populated regions, with a land area six times larger than New Zealand, and a population of 16 million people.

His study focuses on the relationship between agricultural organisation and resource degradation in the pastoral sector. Prior to the early 1980s, livestock and land were owned and managed on a collective basis under the communist system.

Private family farming was introduced in China's pastoral areas as a result of the economic reforms launched in the late 1970s. Livestock are now privately owned and land is nominally leased to individual households.

A typical household owns a herd of about 200 head, made up of sheep, beef cattle and goats. Horses and camels provide transportation. Family members live in felt tents for much of the year and migrate between winter grazing land in the basins and fertile summer pastures in the alpine ranges -- sometimes 150 kilometres or more apart. Most pastoral households belong to ethnic minority groups, such as Kazakh and Mongol.

"The economic reforms have impacted positively on pastoral production and household incomes, but have seriously worsened problems of overstocking and land degradation," says Banks. "Livestock numbers are up 25% since 1985."

"About one-third of Xinjiang's land is now degraded, and the average productivity of the natural grassland is 40% less than 50 years ago."

Banks sees no easy solution to the resource degradation problem.

"Farmer poverty means they are more concerned about meeting daily needs than the long-term effects of overgrazing.

"It also means that individual households don't have the ability to monitor or fence the boundaries of the lands they are leasing."

Many pastoral households prefer sharing their land with other households to cope with the severity and variability of Xinjiang's climate. Temperatures range from about 35oC during summer to
-35oC in winter.

Droughts and blizzards are common. The distribution of rainfall, and therefore grassland resources, varies widely between seasons and years. Sharing land resources is one way of reducing environmental risk.

The government has determined stocking rates for different types of lands, but it lacks the resources and capacity to effectively monitor them.

Banks says group leases rather than individual leases may be more acceptable to the farmers and thus more enforceable.