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Inner Mongolia’s Largest Environmental
Immigration Project Starts
By Li Chun-xia and Shi Jian-jun
[ China Central Television ( CCTV )
International News, June 5, 2002 ] In order to further speed
up the environmental development pace, Inner Mongolia’s
largest Environmental Immigration project has recently started
up. Currently, herdsmen of some ten Banners ( Qi ) and
Counties ( Xian ) in Inner Mongolia’s Chifeng area are being
successively relocated from their scattered dwellings of
remote rural areas to relatively population concentrated and
transportation unobstructed new immigration townships.
During the “Tenth Five-year Plan”, 125,000
people in Chifeng area in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region
will be relocated as environmental immigrants. 14,000 herdsmen
are expected to be relocated this year.
“ to be honest, I am not willing to leave my
ancestral homeland where I have lived for my lifetime,
however, I have to, because my livestock have nothing to live
on due to the environmental devastation”, says herdsman Jinxi.
One of the reasons of herdsmen’s being
relocated is that the grasslands which had plenty of water and
lush grass in the past are being seriously degraded and
desertificated because of increasingly growing livestock
population. Eco-system needs to be protected. On the other
hand, for long period, these herdsmen could not resolve their
problems such as water and electricity supply, access to
education and medical treatment due to the scattered
residential style.
Reportedly, every relocated herdsmen household
could be allocated with a two-room house provided by the local
government and 2 Mu ( approximately 0.1334 hectares ) of
irrigational farmland. The grasslands where they lived still
belong to herdsmen, and they will be allowed to go back to
grasslands to reap grass after the grasslands are recovered.
Henceforth, local governments will tackle the seriously
degraded and desertificated grasslands in a comprehensive way
by encircling, rotational herding, grass-planting, and
tree-planting.
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