Submitted by: Michael G. McManus (FG Staff Journalist)

By Nick Mulvenney, Reuters

Duolun County, China – Until giant sand dunes swallowed his home, Deng Baogui was a shepherd and wheat farmer in an Inner Mongolian village where his family had lived for three generations.

Fortunately for Deng, whose plight might have easily been ignored, the desertification which made it nearly impossible for him to eke out a living also fuelled the spring-time dust storms that blow through Beijing, leaving tones of sand on the streets.

Seven years ago, with the desert creeping south at the rate of 3 km (2 miles) a year and the dust storms getting worse, the Chinese government decided to act and the solution was typical of a country where the Great Wall stands as the ultimate grand project.

It began building a “Green Great Wall”, a 700-km (435 mile) barrier of trees and enclosed grassland which will stretch across Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Shanxi provinces by 2010.

Deng’s entire village — whose 478 residents are all Han Chinese — were relocated by the government to make room for the green barrier which Beijing hopes will hold back the desert.

“In our hearts we were reluctant to move because we were nostalgic. It’s not easy to leave the place I was born and grew up,” said the 50-year-old, standing in the living room of the four-room brick house where he now lives.

“But it was getting very hard to earn a living. The government came again and again over half a year to try and convince us,” he told reporters on a government-organized trip for foreign media.

Desertification is no longer just a problem for China and the thick yellow dust of the sand storms now reaches as far as South Korea, Japan and at times even the United States and Canada.

Read the full story from Reuters