China is trying to restore its degraded pastures by banning grazing, and official sources believe that the policy has produced encouraging results.

Currently, grazing is prohibited in 71.25 million hectares of natural pasture in the country, leaving more than 20 million livestock being raised in captivity instead of roaming on wild grassland, according to the Pasture Monitoring Center of the Ministry of Agriculture.

Natural pasture has a very crucial bearing on ecological safety in the country. China has decided to restrict grazing to special zones, in compliance with the 11th Five-Year Program (2006-2010), which was approved at the Fourth Session of the 10th National People's Congress earlier this month.

China boasts 400 million hectares of natural grassland, or 41.7 percent of the country's total land area, the second largest in the world.

However, due to excessive grazing and blind development, more than 80 percent of China's 260 million hectares of usable grassland has deteriorated, or turned more sandy, leading to escalating soil erosion, more sand and mud being washed into rivers, sandstorms and flooding.

Deterioration of grassland poses a grave threat to the ecological safety of the whole country, said an official with the Pasture Monitoring Center of the Ministry of Agriculture.

In northeastern province of Heilongjiang, the acreage of grassland has shrunk by 50 percent in the past two decades, and the number of livestock per unit of grassland is five times the capacity of the grassland south of the Songhua River.

As a result of excessive development, the acreage of grassland has shrunk by 3.8 million hectares in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region compared with the figure in the 1980s. Per unit grass output dropped by 19.3 percent and capacity by 21.51 percent, according to local animal husbandry authorities.

Serious damage has also occurred to 12 million hectares of grassland, or 50 percent of grassland in the northern part of Tibet Autonomous Region, southwest China. The affected area is expanding by five percent every year, according to local animal husbandry officials.

Other Chinese provinces including Qinghai have also see the worsening to varying extent in local grasslands, according to reports from the localities.

China launched a program to return herds to the grasslands last year. According to the plan, China is expected to spend 26 billion yuan (some 3.25 billion U.S. dollars) to restore more than 660 million hectares of grassland before 2010.

Many herdsers were worried that their income would drop due to the ban. Xu Feng, a herdsman of Heilongjiang Province, however, has found his income has risen by 30 percent and noticed that the local grassland is greener than one year ago.

Grass output in the Mongolian Autonomous County of Dorbod in the region rose to the current 1,500 kg from the former 450 kg per hectare, thanks to the grazing prohibition, said the local animal husbandry department.

Inner Mongolia reported that a three-year grazing-for-grassland pilot program has increased the vegetation rate to over 60 percent from former 20 percent in the Ordos grassland. The Xilin Gol grassland, once one of the major sources of sandstorms, reported only six sandstorms so far this year compared with 27 in 2000.

To achieve ecological improvement, the development of high-efficiency agriculture and animal husbandry, and an increase in income for farmers and herders, the Ministry of Agriculture has urged local governments to adjust the mix of agriculture and animal husbandry and develop follow-up industries to absorb surplus rural laborers in the grazing-for-grassland project areas.