LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The two economic cornerstones of Chifeng City's nine counties and three districts, agriculture and animal husbandry, are threatened by desertification.

Chifeng City continued overuse of sandified farmlands and intensive grazing as the chief reasons behind this issue. The region remains low in plant density and productivity.

Without its green cover, the land becomes increasingly vulnerable to the spring season's high velocity winds, which that deposit as much as 35 tons of sand on a single square kilometer over a single month.

However - there are solutions. Another rural village, Qihetang, has experienced an ecological disaster due to deforestation and over-grazing. A 228-household village in Chifeng's Linxi County, its per capita income in 1990 was 300 yuans, or 50 dollars. Each family harvested a meager 150 kilograms of grain from average landholdings, which led to rampant out-migration.

The local village committees decided to fence hillsides in 1992 and plant fruit trees and prohibit open grazing. In 2000, the State government chipped in with finance and technical advice for the green conversion, later allocating 160 yuans, or 25 dollars, for each unit of land owned by farming families.

Of its total area of 2,154 hectares, Qihentang village today boasts a green cover of 80 percent with fruit trees, pines and resuscitated grasslands.

"Per capita income has (shot up) to 8,000 yuans (1,260 dollars) from fruit and timber trading. Farmers are even buying tractors," Zhang Chun Jie, the head of the village, told IPS.

"Only the severe winter months see migration these days; but many stay home to process farm-grown crepe apples, pears and apricots, grass for fenced animals' fodder and wood for panels. Tourism is a nascent industry too," Jie said.

"More than two billion hectares of degraded land worldwide are suitable for rehabilitation through forest and landscape restoration, the majority of it through a combination of agro-forestry and smallholder farming," Mansour N'Diaye, Chef de Cabinet of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) says.

Situated directly in the middle of Chifeng, close to the Horqin Sandy Land, Wengniute County is the most vulnerable to sandification.

Since October of last year, 400,000 hectares of severely sandified land on either side of the Sudu desert-crossing highway in Wengniute County are being painstakingly converted to forests and landscapes.

"Reclamation, using (labor) and machinery, costs 7,500 yuans or 1,180 dollars per hectare. The survival rate of indigenous sand-tolerant species like Chinese and Mongolian pine, yellow willow, and eight varieties of shrubs, is 75 percent," Wang Feiyue of the Farmland Conversion Office told IPS.

Many feel that the temporary displacement of farming communities throws up its own socio-cultural challenges.

In most reclamations, the Chinese government buys the land from farmers and herdsmen before the project is even launched. For five years all production and grazing is prohibited. From the sixth year seasonal and rotational land-use is allowed.

When a wave of protests in May last year swept across Inner Mongolia, authorities pinned the cause to disruption of deep cultural ties between traditional nomadic ways of life and the grasslands.

China's 12th Five-Year Plan aims to resettle the remaining nomad population of 1.1 million by 2015.

A version of this story was first published by Inter Press Service news agency.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.