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A fine yellow dust that feels as smooth as silk soon covers anyone walking
on the plateau of north-central China: the wind is blowing the topsoil away.
Loess, a fine-grained silt that was probably blown there from Mongolia,
covers some 275 000 square kilometres of the ancient heartland of China,
much of it to a depth of 200 metres or more. The loess is uniquely suitable
for intensive agriculture: it has a fine, uniform structure and being rich
in calcium carbonate, its pH value is around neutral, the optimum for many
crops. It also supports a strong soil fauna, with the resultant benefits
of aeration. It was on this fertility that the extraordinarily rich early
culture of China was built, and many dynastic capitals flourished in the
south of the loess plateau around the ancient city of Xian.

But the plateau loses about 10 000 tonnes of fertile loess per square
kilometre a year. From July to September heavy rains cut deep gullies into
the land. The runoff carries loess into the Yellow River. As a result, the
river carries nearly 2000 million tonnes of silt to the sea each year, three
times as much as any other river. Downstream of the plateau, the river’s
embankments need constant strengthening; periodic abrupt changes of its
course have killed millions of Chinese people, and silt deposits raise the
river bed by up to 100 centimetres a year.

For China, where only 15 per cent of the land can support crops, erosion
on this scale is an appalling waste of fertile soil. Since 1949, government
planners have made it a priority to halt the drift of loess from the plateau.
The Institute for the Control of the Loess Plateau at Mizhi, a market town
in Shaanxi Province, is the centre of current efforts. About 500 kilometres
to the southwest of Beijing, Mizhi is in one of the areas most vulnerable
to erosion: rainfall cuts away 17 600 tonnes of topsoil a square kilometre
each year. The semiarid rounded hills, or mao, are sliced up by between
4 and 8 kilometres of gullies in each square kilometre. More than half the
area slopes at angles steeper than 25 degrees.

A joint venture by the Chinese government and the United Nations Development
Programme, the institute has a staff of 130 and runs six experimental outstations.
It aims to create a model for the control of erosion that is productive
and profitable enough to inspire farmers to adopt it, not only in Mizhi
but across the plateau.

The institute chose 241 villages with a total population of 106 500
to take part in the project. It provides technical supervision, supplemented
by advisers on contract from the UN. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP)
also funds a four-year experiment in erosion control here, supplying about
50 000 tonnes of Canadian wheat to pay people for their work on dams and
to compensate farmers who have been instructed to grow grass to stabilise
slopes rather than cereals for sale. The principal means of controlling
erosion are straightforward: farmers build dams across valleys and gullies.
The dams trap silt swept from the land by heavy rain, which can reach 120
millimetres an hour. A fertile alluvial plain forms gradually; 1 hectare
of land can hold between 750 and 1200 tonnes of silt a year. Once the silt
reaches the top of a dam, workers will dig a canal fed by a spillway over
the dam. Meanwhile, farmers plant the surrounding slopes and hilltops with
shrubs such as sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) and Caragana microphylla,
trees, and grasses such as Astragalus adsurgens.

Terracing stabilises the soil for trees, shrubs and other crops while
grasses sown on steep slopes or hilltops protect the loess against rainfall.
Bench terraces, whose width varies with the steepness of a slope, and small
‘fishscale’ terraces consisting of semicircular scoops for a single bush
or tree, are the commonest types.

Loess has unusual properties that make it ideal for construction. It
consists of unweathered, sharp-edged particles of silica and other minerals
mixed with calcareous cement (carbon carbonate as a fine powder). When loess
is mixed with water, the cement hardens round the grains of silica. To build
dams to hold back soil and water, workers pump water up a slope, mix it
with loess and direct the mud between two earth walls. It dries to form
a solid structure.

Housebuilders in Mizhi also use the compacted strength of loess to construct
traditional cave homes, burrowing about 7 metres into a hillside. These
houses have a stone arch at the front but typically no other internal support.
Farmers use smaller caves behind hill paths to store potatoes, one of the
main crops. A stone slab blocks the entrance, and these dry, cool and, apparently,
rodent-free stores are known locally as the ‘farmer’s refrigerator’.

Many varieties of crops grow on the terraced land and in the fields
on the alluvial flats: potatoes, millet, sorghum, maize, soya beans and
tobacco. Peanuts and melons are recent introductions. This diversification
is an improvement on the ‘grain-first’ policy of Mao Tse-tung. Under Mao’s
policy, farmers planted wheat on unsuitable slopes, contributing greatly
to erosion on the plateau. The wheat from the WFP goes to farmers who have
agreed to grow grasses rather than wheat. As the land is converted to pasture
or forest, more than 6000 farmers have received compensation. With the slogan
of ‘Terraces today, bread tomorrow’, the institute stresses how much more
productive the improved lands are. Since the project began, food production
has increased from 199 kilograms a head to nearly 250 in 1987, while income
increased by more than 60 per cent.

Perhaps the most successful aspect of diversification has been the orchards
of apples, pears and peaches. The director of the institute, Zhu Xan Sa,
told me the fruit trees were one of the modifications to the original plan
for forestry. Although trees such as the false acacia, poplar and Chinese
fir proved valuable in controlling erosion and improving the microclimate,
they did not generate enough profit for farmers, so the project introduced
fruit trees to replace them. Fruit trees turned out to be well suited to
the area. The large, crispy and delicious Red Star apple, and a yellow rounded
variety of the Chinese sand pear Pyrus pyrifolia, which has a firm, slightly
gritty texture, did particularly well. They are some of the best apples
and pears I have ever tasted. Clearly, exports to neighbouring provinces
such as Inner Mongolia would rise if there were better transport facilities.

Fruit growing has proved highly profitable. To encourage it, the institute’s
nursery sells two-year-old trees for a third of their real cost. The other
profitable innovation, animal husbandry, has been less of a clear-cut success.
As planned, the number of sheep, goats and rabbits has trebled in three
years. Unfortunately, production of fodder has not kept up with the increase
in stock. In 1987, in a mid-term review of the project, the UN found severe
overgrazing in all natural pasture as well as the new alfalfa fields. Farmers
grew only a few species for fodder. Alfalfa was to have been one of the
main fodder plants, but as a legume it obtains most of its nitrogen from
the soil through the action of nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in nodules
on its roots. Loess lacks these bacteria so alfalfa grows poorly, starved
of nitrogen. The project’s organisers are worried about this because they
plan to introduce improved species of sheep and goats, such as merino and
Angora, that need richer food.

During my visit some 14 months later, there was evidence of tighter
control on grazing, but the alfalfa was still without nodules. I was told
that the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN was seeking specialist
advice abroad. This is an important aspect of the UN’s involvement in China,
providing local agriculturalists with access to up-to-date expertise. Staff
at Mizhi also benefit from generous funding to help with training from the
Swedish government, which has sponsored many of them on courses in Sweden.

While the views of foreign experts are eagerly sought and apparently
highly valued, the Mizhi institute also advises students of erosion control
from Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Ethiopia. In China, reports, articles,
conferences and videos (in Chinese and English) spread the lessons of Mizhi
around the country, but many villages are so inaccessible that it is difficult
to reach farmers directly. One way round this has been for delegations from
villages to spend a day or two at the project’s fields, dams and terraces.

The direct benefits to local people of the measures to control erosion
are now well known, but project workers also study the more remote and altruistic
effects. Researchers at the Mahuyu Hydrological Station estimate that the
discharge of silt from the project area to the Yellow River decreased by
40 000 tonnes during 1986 and 1987.

Will the Mizhi project inspire similar ventures elsewhere in Shaanxi
or in the other five provinces that share the plateau? The $9 million donated
by the WFP undoubtedly bought improved yields and wealth for the 241 villages
in the project area: television aerials and, surprisingly, newly built temples
testify to that. But the area is atypical in two crucial respects; more
dams and terraces had been built there than in the rest of Mizhi county
before the project began; and it is far more accessible than the surrounding
area. As dams and terracing are the most labour-intensive part of any project
to control erosion (it takes 1000 work days to construct 1 hectare of terrace)
and access is crucial both for producing the crop and for selling it, it
is clearly difficult to extrapolate from the experience of Mizhi. Moreover,
a long-term study by an associate of the institute showed that animal husbandry
and fruit culture were the most profitable ways to use land, while terraces
took much longer to repay the investment.

Where orchards are grown on terraces, farmers profit by controlling
erosion. But without better transport to expand the market, the lure of
profit could lead to overproduction locally and a slump in fruit prices.
This is a problem for many areas of Chinese agriculture. For example, a
bumper harvest in Xinjiang three years ago produced 2 million tonnes of
grain surplus to local requirements, but only 600 000 tonnes of that could
be moved to less fortunate areas of the country. In Mizhi, the instability
of prices for meat, fur and fleeces causes some concern about the farmers’
desire to convert marginal slopes from agriculture to grassland.

Clearly, a lot depends on the administrative and legal structure within
which farmers operate. In the redistribution of land that took place in
the early 1980s, the village allotted each family a certain amount of various
types of land under its control (agricultural, forest or grassland) on a
30-year heritable contract, with conditions on its use and maintenance.
The ganbu, or village committee, decides on the allocations and the conditions,
and there is a wide variety between villages. Sometimes, tasks which are
backed by the threat of fines are imposed on the families, such as terracing
part of their land. In some of the villages around Mizhi the ganbu does
not allocate all its land to families, but rents out certain lands, an orchard
or a forest, to a collective group of families. This ensures that the village
has funds of its own, which it can then use for social projects, such as
paying for measures to conserve the soil. In the current economic crisis,
the government is unlikely to provide more funds for these works so local
funding may well be crucial.

That is, of course, if all large-scale soil conservation in the future
has to be paid for in this way. But government policy on compulsory communal
labour is far from clear; in Beijing, the Ministry of Agriculture told me
that the target was 20 days compulsory labour from everyone each year. In
the Qinghai plateau in the northwest, peasants told us they had to do 40
days work a year, while at Mizhi we were told the requirement was 25 days,
or its monetary equivalent. Yet a study of the Mizhi project area published
in June 1988 by Stan Klinkenberg of the Catholic University Nijmegen, in
the Netherlands, said that compulsory labour had been totally abandoned
because of the farmers’ resistance in Mizhi county (although, in his opinion,
‘it would be a good thing to maintain this form of labour for as long as
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But compulsion alone is not the answer; in the 1970s the authorities
found compulsion without motivation led to sloppy work, and worse, inadequate
maintenance. A UN report even quotes peasants as saying: ‘They are the government’s
terraces, the government should maintain them.’ After the Beijing massacre,
this cynical, alienated attitude to the authorities is likely to become
widespread. So it is all the more important that the Mizhi institute can
demonstrate the immediate local benefits of controlling erosion. But the
Beijing massacre may have its effect on the work of the institute, too.
The WFP’s food aid comes from a variety of sources, and so current commitments
are unlikely to be affected by boycotts or restrictions from individual
countries. Future projects may well receive a less favourable hearing before
the annual meeting of the WFP’s governing body. This year’s was held in
Rome the week before the massacre, and Chinese projects were approved without
any politically motivated comment.

Sweden’s important support for the Mizhi institute may also be affected.
A high-level meeting in Stockholm in the first week of June decided not
to consider any new projects in China for two or three months, although
ongoing projects would continue – these include funding for training, operations
and equipment at Mizhi. But an extension to the scheme at Mizhi is due for
consideration later this year, and while Swedish aid officials think the
project is clearly humanitarian, a climate of repression in China will make
it harder to argue for support of a government research institute, however
well intentioned.

Tim Grout-Smith is a senior producer with the BBC World Service. Last
year he travelled to China with the UN’s World Food Programme for the World
Service’s Development series.