According to local officials, desertification in Yulin, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, is effectively under control.

The sand area in Yulin accounts for nearly half the 40,000-square-kilometer Maowusu Sand Area, which also covers the southern part of Erdos Plateau in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and the Yanchi, Lingwu and Taole counties of Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

Kang Wenwei, vice-director of the city's forestry bureau, said between 3,300 and 6,600 hectares of land in the city becomes desertified annually.

Meanwhile, trees are planted on more than 33,300 hectares of land in the city's sand area each year. "In some parts of the city desertification is serious, but on the whole the situation is becoming better and better," Kang said.

The improvement is largely due to the city adopting preferential policies such as tax exemption and easy access to loans in an effort to encourage individuals to participate in sand control.

According to statistics from the Shaanxi Research Center for Sand Control, the area of trees and grass on the Yulin sand area has reached 990,000 hectares and the coverage rate has risen from 1.8 per cent in 1949 to 32.5 percent today.

Desertification is one of the most pressing environmental problems faced by China. Statistics show more than 2.67 million square kilometers of land in the country is desertified, accounting for 27.9 percent of the total land area and affecting nearly 400 million people.

China started to build shelter belts in the "three norths" (Northwest, Northeast and North China) in 1978, and last year a project to prevent sandstorms in the Beijing-Tianjin rim was launched.

(China Daily August 15, 2003)