China plans to join forces with neighboring countries in a drive to combat sandstorms, Qu Guilin, director of the department of International Cooperation under the State Forestry Administration (SFA), said at a press conference on the sidelines of the International Conference on Women and Desertification, which opened in Beijing yesterday.

The three-day international conference is jointly sponsored by the UNCCD Secretariat, together with the governments of China, Algeria and Italy, and focuses on the role of women in combating desertification. It is one of several major conferences taking place to mark the 2006 International Year of Deserts and Desertification (IYDD).

Experts in the fields of gender issues and sustainable development, representatives of civil society, as well as high-level country representatives and other eminent personalities gathered to share experiences and seek ways of empowering women as an effective means to counter land degradation and rural poverty.

Liu Tuo, head of the SFA's sandy land control office, said China, Japan, South Korea and Mongolia have jointly worked out a plan for sandstorm control in Northeast Asia, which they hope will counter the increasing threat of an environmental disaster in the region.

"The plan includes atmosphere monitoring and ground soil control," he said.

"It will be implemented as soon as international funding is available."

To date, China has cooperated with many other nations in the fight against desertification and land degradation, a global ecological problem which affects two-thirds of the world's countries, with a fifth of the global population suffering as a result of its affects including sandstorms and poverty.

Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu, addressing the conference, said: "The solution to the difficult problem of desertification requires the joint efforts of the international community."

As a responsible country and a permanent and reliable world partner, China will make a concerted effort to promote international cooperation in combating desertification, he said.

Hui made it clear that the government was committed to working with the international community to preserve the world's delicate environment.

Meanwhile, a leading agricultural expert said China's vast tracts of farmland must not be neglected in the battle against sandstorms.

Dusty conditions plagued a large part of northern China this spring with a particularly heavy dust storm hitting Beijing on April 16, during which 330,000 tons of dust fell on the capital.

Li Hongwen, a professor from the China Agriculture University, said a large part of the dust was not actually sand, which is said to blow in from the deserts of Inner Mongolia, but soil from farms around the capital.

Li and his colleagues collected soil samples from farms in the suburbs of Beijing and neighboring Hebei Province, as well as dust from the deserts of Inner Mongolia.

Only extremely small particles of dust could be blown to Beijing from Inner Mongolia. Li found that the granules of the dust falling in Beijing were much larger than desert sand meaning the majority was from nearby farms and not the desert.

In reaction to this problem the Ministry of Agriculture is now promoting "conservation tillage", an innovative method of cultivation that challenges traditional methods that Chinese farmers have used for thousands of years.

"Conservation tillage" differs from traditional plowing in that crop remains are left in the soil, which decompose and act to bind the soil, thereby reducing the affect of wind and water erosion, Li explained.

Beijing yesterday announced its plan for "conservation tillage" to become mandatory in three years.

By 2008, 153,000 hectares of Beijing's farmland will be cultivated this way.

(China Daily, China.org.cn May 30, 2006)