The once arid land on Loess Plateau has heard the footsteps of
spring: trees and grass have turned green, lambs are bleating and
farmers are busy in their croplands.
Guo Sanren, a farmer born and raised on the wasteland in a
mountain valley in Jungar Banner, north China's
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is astonished.
His hometown is located on the 640,000 sq km Loess Plateau on
the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River. Unsustainable
farm production and a huge population base used to cause land
erosion that turned local farmlands useless.
Like many locals, Guo used to do odd jobs in cities to feed his
nevertheless destitute family, which had lived in abject poverty
until a World Bank project
was launched in his hometown seven years ago.
"It'd be the same useless land if not for the World Bank loans,"
said Guo, who has returned home to be a farmer again.
In the past seven years, the WB project has improved biology,
planted trees and built roads and other facilities in his hometown.
Guo's family applied for 35,000 yuan (US$4,375) in loans to sink a
well and build greenhouses to plant vegetables. They made 9,000
yuan (US$1,125) in net income the very next year.
Last year alone, the family made more than 35,000 yuan and had a
new house built.
"I never earned that much working in any city," he told Xinhua
Friday.
The Loess Plateau project involves a total investment of 4.2
billion yuan (US$525 million), including US$300 million of WB
loans.
The project has benefited at least 3.2 million people in Inner
Mongolia,
Shanxi Province and
Shaanxi and
Gansu provinces in the northwest, lifting more than 1 million
locals out of abject poverty, said Wang Huanzhu, a WB project
official.
"We've banned pasturing on grasslands, planted trees and grass
and promoted terraced fields on mountains to improve local
biology," said Wang.
The WB project has curbed soil erosion on 920,000 hectares of
land and cut eroded soil by 60 million tons a year.
It also increased the net per-capita income of local farmers to
1,624 yuan (US$200) from 585 yuan (US$73). By the end of 2005, the
number of needy households had been reduced from 256,000 to 66,000,
with only 12 percent of the locals still living below the poverty
line, as against 39 percent reported in 1999.
The project has been praised by former WB president James
Wolfensohn as one of the best projects ever implemented in the
world.
"With terraced fields and new irrigation systems, our unit yield
of wheat has doubled and we can make at least around US$190 more
than before in each hectare of cropland," said Zhang Kejian, a
farmer in Jixian county, north China's Shanxi Province.
(Xinhua News Agency March 11, 2006)