Out of dust A barren land restored

Loess plateau was once the world's most eroded place, until a Chinese project began reversing decades of damage from farming

- Helen Davidson

It was one of China's most ambitious environmental endeavours ever.

The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 640,000 sq km across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.

Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the cover. Every year the dust from the plain jammed the Yellow River with silt (this is how the river gets its name), sending plumes of loess sediment across Chinese cities - including to the capital, Beijing.

So in 1999 the Chinese government took drastic emergency action with the launch of Grain to Green, a pilot project backed by World Bank funding, to regreen the plateau and reverse the damage done by overgrazing and over-cultivation of the once forested hillsides that would become what the bank in 2004 described as "the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world".

The primary focus was to restore agricultural production and incomes in the plateau, but the dust storms sent to already polluted cities, "making people cough even more", also became a driver, said Peter Bridgewater, an honorary professor at the Australian National University's Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies.

World Bank participants spent more than three years designing the project, working with experts as well as communities, officials and farmers on how to overturn the long-running unsustainable grazing and herding of livestock. Tree-cutting, planting on hillsides and uncurbed sheep and goat grazing were banned. The sustainable practices demonstrated in some small villages were scaled up.