[Part 2, Sediment as resources: development of warping dams on the loess plateau]

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Social factors

Presently villages are established on top of mounds, where the land is relatively flat compared with the slopes. Each mound supports a so-called natural village, usually with a population of just 100, or a few hundreds. For administrative purpose, several natural villages are congregated into an administrative village, and several administrative villages into a township. The natural villages are quite isolated from each other due to the disruptive terrain. Nowadays, with the availability of motor vehicles, the natural villages are being served by scheduled small buses, or vans, which link them to the township for access to markets and public services, like schools and hospitals. This represents already a huge progress from just a decade or two ago. To develop the gullies it is necessary to induce farmers to move away from their traditional natural villages and consider settling in the low-lying gullies.

Villagers do not normally have enough savings or willingness to invest in land development. Even in stripping the hill slopes for farming, it is done with minimal labor input. [Picture shows planting on a small patch of ground over a very steep slope with hardly any labor input and expecting little in return.] With whatever little savings they have, they would consider first buying a motor vehicle to expand into transportation activities, which usually reap considerable improvement in income. I had met a farmer who was willing to pay an exorbitant interest of 3% per month in order to secure a loan of a few thousand yuan to supplement his own savings for the purchase of a 3-wheel lorry. The lack of adequate financial sources has kept the farmers from investing into improving their means of production, keeping the rural economy perpetually backward. Without security in land tenure or promise of improvement, farmers are neglecting farming, selling instead their labor for minimal wages in mining and township enterprises. Though China's present farming population is far too large and must be reduced, there is no reason why this sector of the population should remain forever poor, while in fact land development can double and redouble farmers' incomes with little investment.

Take for example a case in Inner Mongolia near Yellow River's northern bend. Lijiageleng collective is a village of 26 households in the Gongyigai subwatershed with a population of 89 and a labor force of merely 28. In 1993 before development villagers farmed 17 ha of farmland, and per capita income was 500Y, lying at the margin of poverty level. After a warping dam was built, and 16 ha of terrace land received irrigation, the per capita income leaped from 500Y in 1994 to 1900Y in 1997, and then to 2300Y in 1998. There is no doubt that the villagers welcome the development, and with new earnings they are perfectly capable to repay the loan for building the warping dam and improving the farmland through rents.

Organizational requisites

Gully development must be an organized effort with a central agency responsible for acquiring the loan, implementing the planning and construction of the project. Subsequently the land is to be rented to the villagers, and rents collected from the villagers annually to repay for the loan. It cannot be implemented entirely under the initiatives of individual farmers, and some sort of social organizational structure is needed to provide additional technical as well as economical inputs. Small loans to individual farmers would not result in basic farmland development (until their incomes are an order of magnitude higher than the present), and most likely would be divested for other uses.

For land development there are many facets to consider. At the planning stage the selection of early sites is delicate. Their success would demonstrate the program's feasibility. Sites which are easily accessible and located at the newly booming regions must be first considered. Regions targeted for natural gas development, for example, generate high purchasing environment with their imported labor force. They create favorable consumer markets for farmers to produce cash crops. Farmland investment in such regions is guarantee of success. Other land features favorable for development are too numerous to be mentioned here, and must rely on the judgment of the developers. Here, we envision the developers would be some government agencies on the county-level, such as the county water-soil conservation department or the agricultural department, whose personnel would possess the technical know-how to build key dams and warping dams, and are familiar with the local farming conditions. [For example, the county water-soil conservation department of Helin, Inner Mongolia, shown in picture, consisting of an experienced engineer assisted by a team of very capable young engineers, and equipped with a jeep and several motorbikes, is perfectly capable of carrying out the technical aspects of the development. Currently they are designing and implementing projects included in a World Bank loan.]

With gully land being developed from "wasteland," it is free of government grain-production quota, and the farmers may produce and market any type of crops they find profitable. Growing vegetable with plastic-sheet greenhouses can gross an income 15 times, or more, than the average staple crops. With higher income for the farmers a higher land rental can be justified, which would lead a more rapid recovery of the investment cost, making the project attractive.

Under the present government policy wasteland may be contracted to farmers with multi-decade user rights. The farmers are thus assured of land tenure for the duration of the contract. Study must be made to establish the long-term worth of the land. Correct appraisals of the land's value will affect the success of the program in attracting investments. The collection of rents from the farmers would necessitate the cooperation of the county government. Most likely, the management of land development would have to fall into the administrative domain of the county government, although it is not impossible to have the village cooperatives to take up the challenge.

Finally, if land development is financed by a long-term loan, where would the loan come from? This is still an unexplored area. I hope that most of the financial institutions worldwide will find it attractive to make such loans, once the creditability of the program is fully demonstrated.

Sediment retention subsidy

To hasten the process of land development with sediment reduction benefits, the government should recognize the actual value of sediment reduction to the population residing in the densely populated North China plain so as to compensate the effort with subsidies. For example, current sediment clearing from the main river channel in the lower reaches would cost about 5.0 Y per ton. There, sediment-laden river water will be pumped from the channel between the dikes to the surrounding land behind the dikes to raise the land level in order to keep pace with the ever rising height of the dikes. This is done wherever such clearing facility is available. Sediment in the tributaries is seldom cleared. [Picture shows the nearly impossible task of sediment clearing in the downstream region due to the enormity of the scope. Consequently, the river bed is rising in height about one meter per decade.] As a whole, the rule-of-thumb estimate of a reasonable sediment clearing cost would be about 2.0 Y per ton. If the government were to subsidize each key dam for the sediment it would retain, say, in the next 10 years after the dam is built, to the tune of 2.0 Y per ton, it would make gully development much more viable and self-sustainable. In most cases the subsidy would account for over 70% of the initial key dam construction cost.

Take for example a case in northern Shaanxi, at Hengshan county, where the cost of constructing a key dam 35 m high, controlling a catchment basin of 3 sq km in area, and with a reservoir storage capacity of 800,000 cu m, is about 500,000 Y. Every year it retains 150,000 cu m of runoff, and traps 37,000 tons (28,500 cu m) of sediment. The area has a high erosion rate, 12,000 tons per sq km, and produces a large percentage of coarse sediment (about 50%), the type that cannot be flushed out to sea. For purpose of discussion lets take the coarse sediment clearing cost to be 2.0 Y per ton, and with half of the 37,000 tons of retained sediment, or 18,500 tons, to be coarse, this key dam generates an indirect saving of 37,000 Y to the national economy annually.

Roughly, a minimum of 20 cu m of water is needed to transport 1 ton of fine sediment out to sea. By reducing fine sediment by 18,500 tons annually, the saving in 370,000 cu m of river water in its main channel may be put to better uses. Of course, the dam also intercepts 155,000 cu m of surface runoff, which would otherwise be entering into the channel, and the net gain in water supply for the downstream channel is 215,000 cu m. Agricultural benefits that can be derived from this source of water is estimated to be 0.238 Y per cu m, and thus this part of sediment reduction generates a value about 50,000 Y to the national economy annually. Together, the sediment-retention benefit to the national economy is conservatively estimated to be 87,000Y annually, which, or part of which, if realizable as a form of government subsidy to the project, would go a long way in paying for the construction cost of the key dam.

In fact, if the warping dams of required standards built with private funds were also paid 1.0 Y per ton of sediment that they would trap in the next 10 years, many village cooperatives and individual tractor owners will devote their labor and resources to the building of warping dams, without further assistance by the government. Under the same subsidy scheme even the county governments would be subsidized for their rural road projects which usually involve high earth structures across gullies with sediment trapping benefits.

The sediment load carried by Yellow River is 1.6 billion tons annually. A simple calculation shows that the total load in 10 years is 16 billion tons, and the total subsidy cost is no more than 20 billion Y, which is much less than the construction cost of the Xiaolangdi project, and the subsidy cost is completely recovered if the service life of the Xiaolangdi project can be extended for an extra 10 years. If sediment trapping can be turned into self-sustaining enterprise, the cost for clearing Yellow River of sediment is quite limited, and yet it would have fulfilled a millennium dream that Yellow River would one day flow clear!

Final remarks

It has become increasingly clear that farmland improvement in the loess plateau can be financed through loans. By either terracing the hill slopes or warping the gullies the increase in productivity on improved land is sufficient to repay for the initial investment. This is because the purchasing power of the local population is increased, raising also farmers' incomes, so that it is economically feasible to increase investment in the development of high-quality farmland. Here, we investigate the potential in developing the gully floors with warping dams, to take advantage of their low-lying positions and high soil-moisture contents to create into high-yield farmland. New data on rural economy show that such an advance in farming is totally feasible at the present time. Financial sources, private or public, are however badly lacking in this emerging, but overlooked, economic sector. This article is to call attention to such a new reality.

Return to Part 1 : Abstract - Urgency for sediment control - Gully development

Picture credits: Photos by George Leung, except last picture which is taken from Picture Albums of the Yellow River, Publication Center Yellow River Conservancy Commission, Beijing, China, 1991.