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THE NEW CLIMATE

Mongolian herdsmen no longer free to roam

In an effort to fight desertification, China has forcibly moved thousands of Inner Mongolians off traditional pastures and into crowded cities

GEOFFREY YORK
March 6, 2008

WU XING, CHINA — For as long as anyone can remember, Bator and his ancestors were horse-riding herdsmen, free to roam the vast grasslands of Inner Mongolia with their animals. On a spring day in 2002, his freedom was abruptly cancelled. A Chinese official drove his jeep to Bator’s pasture, brandishing a piece of paper and announcing that the government was terminating the Mongolian way of life. Since then, Bator has not been on a horse. Today he lives in a small brick house in a new Chinese village, crowded among hundreds of other dispossessed herders. He survives on a paltry income from three dairy cows that the government forced him to buy, supplemented by labouring jobs at a railway station. He yearns to go back home to his grasslands and his horses. “I feel like a bird in a cage,” Bator says. “We have no freedom and no land.” Bator is among thousands of Inner Mongolians who have been forcibly moved off their traditional pastures in the past few years as China fights desertification, the ecological disaster that has triggered massive dust storms across northern China, sending clouds of pollution toward Japan, Korea and even as far as British Columbia. The Mongolian herders, like millions of other impoverished people around the planet, have become environmental refugees. Their ranks are rapidly growing. There are already an estimated 24 million environmental migrants around the world, twice as many as the number of refugees fleeing wars or political persecution.

By 2010, the United Nations has warned, as many as 50 million people could be displaced by crises such as desertification, deforestation, droughts, famines, floods and climate change. And by mid-century, the number of environmental refugees could swell to 200 million.

Around the world, examples abound. In the low-lying river deltas of India and Bangladesh, global warming has forced thousands of villagers to flee from islands that are threatened by severe storms and rising sea levels.

In Africa, desertification is triggering an exodus by farmers abandoning barren fields. Regions such as Darfur are suffering from water shortages that contribute to their refugee crises.

In the Pacific Ocean, whole islands are on the verge of disappearing. Rogue waves have sometimes swept across the entire length of populated islands.

In East Asia and Southeast Asia, droughts and floods are expected to grow worse as climate change accelerates, with millions more losing their homes. Many people are still in refugee camps after the giant tsunami of 2004.

And even in North America and Europe, thousands have died or lost their homes because of bushfires, heat waves, hurricanes and floods, believed to be linked to climate change.

For those forced to migrate, the dislocation is traumatic. The herders of Inner Mongolia, who found themselves on the front lines of the desertification crisis, were among the first to pay the price for China’s belated efforts to tackle the problem.

Since 2001, more than 800,000 people in Inner Mongolia have been relocated from their pastures in an attempt to reduce overgrazing and sandstorms. Grazing has been prohibited in more than one-third of Inner Mongolia’s territory.

“Ecological immigration is a painful, disruptive and involuntary process that is not only against the will of the local Mongolians but also against nature,” said a report by the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre, a U.S.-based group.

It said the relocation policy has endangered the very existence of the Mongolians as a people. Those who resisted the relocation were arrested, detained or assaulted, and their property was destroyed or confiscated, the report said.

China insists that the heavy-handed tactics are necessary. More than 27 per cent of its territory is now covered by deserts, compared with 18 per cent in 1994. China’s grasslands have shrunk by 15,000 square kilometres every year since the early 1980s. Sandstorms from the expanding deserts are blowing into China’s northern cities, choking millions of people and causing respiratory diseases and eye infections. Beijing alone is hit with a million tonnes of desert dust annually. The dust binds with airborne pollutants from factories and coal plants, creating a toxic haze that drifts to Korea, Japan and North America.

Much of the desertification is a result of overgrazing by new farmers from the Han Chinese ethnic majority, who poured into Inner Mongolia to raise goats when the cashmere industry became lucrative in the 1980s. Today the number of Han Chinese in Inner Mongolia is five times greater than the number of Mongolians who traditionally lived on the grasslands.

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