Premier Wen Jiabao has called for improved efforts to promote
the country's ecological balance and sustainable economic and
social development, which, he said, has a great impact on the
survival and development of the Chinese nation.
Addressing a Sept. 27-28 national forestry conference, the
premier said China must have a good understanding of the important
and strategic position of the forestry sector in economic
construction and social development, and attach great importance to
the sustainable development of the sector.
Wen said forestry should be viewed as a sector which occupies
the most fundamental position in China's ambitious program to
develop its impoverished and ecologically fragile western
region.
China should step up the development of its forestry sector in a
responsible way, continue its six major national afforestation
projects and encourage investment from various channels for
afforestation so as to ensure ecological balance through creating a
good ecological system and through sustainable exploitation, he
acknowledged.
He urged governments at all levels to include afforestation
projects into their overall economic and social development
programs.
The Chinese government has recently published its decision
calling for greater efforts to facilitate the country's
afforestation campaign, and improve its management of forestry
resources for sustainable social and economic development.
Despite massive afforestation projects over the past two
decades, China's environmental situation allows no room for
optimism due to frequent natural adversities, such as flooding and
droughts.
Zhou Shengxian, director of the State Forestry Administration
(SFA), said earlier this year that about 400 million people have
been affected by desertification and a total of 1.7 million square
kilometers of land, or 18.2 percent of China's total land area, has
become seriously degraded and turned sandy.
The sandy land is expanding by 3,436 sq km per year, noted the
official.
Sandstorms have been witnessed almost every year in northern
China, including Beijing and Tianjin municipalities, and
devastating floods along the Yangtze River in the central and east
China provinces Hubei, Hunan and Anhui in 1998, partly due to
excessive deforestation.
Those devastating floods prompted the Chinese central government
to ban logging of nature forests in the upper reaches of the river
and elsewhere in China in a substantial effort to curb water and
soil erosion, which was worsened by commercial logging.
Hundreds of thousands of loggers in the upper reaches of the
Yangtze river and in China's northernmost Heilongjiang province
lost their jobs and many of them have been employed instead to
plant trees and protect existing forests.
In an interview with Xinhua earlier this month, the SFA director
said that China has plans to invest 700 billion yuan (US$85
billion) in the coming five decades on six major national
ecological projects in a bid to plant a total of 73 million ha of
trees and other vegetation to turn China into an
ecologically-friendly land.
Last year, 7.47 million ha of trees were planted, 4.15 million
hectares of farmland were turned back into woods and 95.1 million
hectares of natural forests were put under proper protection, said
Zhou.
Meanwhile, government spending in forestry sector surged 93
percent on an annual basis to 34.7 billion yuan (US$4.18 billion)
last year.
"In contrast to the forest coverage rate of 8.6 percent in the
early 1950s, 16.55 percent of China's territory is currently
covered with 158.7 million hectares of forest," Zhou added.
The figure is expected to rise to 26 percent in five decades,
according to a government plan.
(Xinhua News Agency September 28, 2003)