Final Report - Asian Development Bank

(xiii) lack of national, regional, inter-provincial and intra-provincial coordination on natural
resource, biodiversity conservation, and land use planning;
(xiv) limited institutional advisory support services including agricultural extension services
– particularly in meeting the more specific needs of poverty households living in hill,
mountain and other more remote areas;
(xv) conflicting mandates and contradictory policies and regulations amongst institutional
support services and across agencies that develop and implement land use and
related natural resource policies;
(xvi) an inadequate regulatory environment for combating land degradation and the loss of
biodiversity resources;
(xvii) under pricing of water, pasture, forest products and other natural resources – leading
to over use, inefficient use, inefficient allocations of scarce land resources, and little
incentive to move land to higher value uses;
(xviii) poor construction and maintenance standards of facilities; and
(xix) donor, government and other land degradation and related projects that are not
sustainable once project funding comes to an end – meaning that environmental, land
use and livelihood benefits are also not sustained when funding ends.
22. General threats to biodiversity in the Qinling Mountains are: (i) loss of vegetation from past
commercial or illegal timber harvesting; (ii) agricultural expansion and encroachment; (iii) illegal taking
of natural resources; (iv) reduced potential for gene exchange due to fragmentation by construction of
highways and infrastructure; and (v) unregulated development of tourism.
23. Commercial logging was addressed in 1998 by the Natural Forest Protection Program 5 ,
which banned logging in natural forests nationwide. While this stopped commercial logging (except in
plantations), it does not regulate household use of timber for construction, cooking, and/or heating.
24. Agricultural encroachment began when people first settled southern Shaanxi Province. The
flat lands with easy access to water were quickly settled while the remote and rugged terrain in the
Qinling was ignored except as a source of natural resources. But in modern times, population
pressure pushed farmers further into the mountains in search of arable lands. Farming on the steep
slopes of the Qinling caused soil erosion that washed away valuable soils and choked waterways.
Estimates are that 50% of sediment entering the Yellow River above Henan Province and 12% of the
total sediment in the Yangtze River is from Shaanxi 6 .
25. To reverse this trend in land degradation, the PRC instituted the Sloping Land Conversion
Program (or “Grain for Green” program) in 2000. The program provides grain, cash and saplings to
farmers who convert their steeply sloping farmlands to grassland or woodland 7 . The program has
been implemented on 600,000 to 800,000 ha in the Qinling as a whole, including a portion of the
Project Area (the exact amount is unknown) 8 . The degradation of ecological function includes
decreased forests and species, reduction of water conservation, acceleration of soil erosion, overuse
of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and more frequent flood and drought. The result is that the
conditions for human survival are getting worse. 9 Data on resource degradation in the Project Area
from 1988 to 1998 indicates that the forest area decreased at 240 ha per year, and the area suffering
water and soil loss increased at 18 ha per year (about 5% of the Project Area) per annum.
26. The strategies proposed in 1998 to protect the Qinling Mountains included:
5 Xu Jintao, E. Katsigris and T. A. White. 2001. Implementing the Natural Forest Protection Program and the
Sloping Land Conversion Program: Lessons and Policy Recommendations. CCICED Task Force on Forests
and Grasslands. China Forestry Publishing House, Beijing, 98p.
6 Rui,Li, Zhongming,Wen, Fei,Wang, Yue, Wang, and Mingliang, Zhou. Case Study on Conversion of Farmland
to Forest and Grassland in Ansai County, Shaanxi Province. Reprot prepared for the CCIECED Western China
Grasslands Task Force June 2001.
7 Xu Jintao, E. Katsigris and T. A. White. 2001. Implementing the Natural Forest Protection Program and the
Sloping Land Conversion Program: Lessons and Policy Recommendations. CCICED Task Force on Forests
and Grasslands. China Forestry Publishing House, Beijing, 98p.
8 Data collected by the PPTA Team on the 16 administrative villages in the CDA zone indicated that between
67% and 93% (with an un-weighted average of 84% across the 16 administrative villages) of the village land
area had been converted from agriculture (grain) to forestry (green).
9 “Shaanxi Qinling Ecosystem Protection Zone (May 2005)
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