Severe sand storms are currently ravaging large parts of central Asia, especially Mongolia and China, where deserts are rapidly expanding, threatening both people and peatlands. At the same time the International Peat Society publishes in her latest Peatlands International magazine an uncritical report on experiments of the Japanese Peat Society (JPS) and the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography. The JPS “is striving for the reclamation of desert and desertified land by utilizing the superior characteristics of peat”. The experiments were performed in the period 1997 – 2000 in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, north-western China. The Region with an annual rainfall of 150 mm is dominated by deserts. Only 5 percent of the area supports human life. It depends upon snowmelt water from the surrounding mountains to irrigate the oases. The Takla Makan Desert (300,000 km2) between the Kunlun Mountains on the south and the Tianshan Mountains on the north is the second largest desert complex of the Earth. It occupies most of the basin of the river Tarim that in the past 30 years has dried up over 300 km as a result of reclamation of desert for cereal and cotton production. North of the Tianshan Mountains lies the Gurbantunggut Desert in the Junggar Basin where the experiments were done.
Peat from 200 km far away was mixed with the desert soil. The plots were irrigated with deep groundwater and fertilized with N and P. Of course the results of peat application were positive: yields were 4-6 times larger than without peat.
In the next decade China will allocate huge amounts of money to curb the country’s desertification. Dragging peat into the desert will not be a solution to combat the country’s desertification as it does not address the root causes. These include:
- Lack of water: one just has to accept that there are places in the world that are not suited for agriculture
- Overexploitation of these vulnerable habitats
- Waste of water in current agricultural practise
- Climate change.
Dragging peat into the desert on a large scale will destroy the peatlands over large areas and will contribute to climate change, both where the peat is extracted, and globally as the peat will very rapidly oxidize in these arid landscapes.