Linkage study on land regime and land degradation in Inner Mongolia, China : a case study at village level in East Uljumchin Banner

Abstract

When I was a little girl, a story about Genghis Khan and his Mongolian Empire impressed me deeply. Afterwards, the pastoral life style with horse riding and livestock moving around became my teenager’s dream. Having grown up, I felt so lucky of working for an environmental NGO in China. Coping with so many hot environmental issues gave me strong feelings of achievement. Among them, the protection of a piece of grassland located in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region always held my attention and care. Since 1978, the year as the milestone for the economic boom in China, industrialization and urbanization has been dominating all the local development strategic planning. Industrialized development has brought fast and huge changes into people who suffered from poverty and famine. However, it also has been having an impact on the environment in China. Most rural people still remain poor. But for community of the study area, industrialization and urbanization has disadvantaged the pastoralists because of enclosing of their grazing lands. The same as other areas in rural China, local governments in Inner Mongolia are clearly aware of the values in grassland. Transferring grassland into farming land may be the old approach to land use but if done in the grazing lands, it has done more damage than good. Cases of land expropriation for industrialization and urbanization are expanding. Although the pastoral population is small, environmental impacts resulted from social and economic changing are quite serious. With contemporary institutions, local pastoralists are easily marginalized due to low level education and other social cultural reasons. Grassland, as the most important natural resources they have, could be exploited by outsiders with capitals and ambitions pursuing short period profits. On the other side, with the loss of their nomadic traditions, generation gap could be clearly found out. It is really hard to say either that grassland management could have a better future though the modern pastoralists could exclude others.