Environmental degradation in western China remains a pressing problem although there has been improvement in some regions, according to a survey conducted by the State Environmental Protection Administration.

To reverse the negative trend, the government has been spending heavily on building up the environment. It has outlawed the logging of natural forests in the region and has been subsidizing farmers with food and materials to plant trees.

It has just initiated a new phase of massive afforestation in the western and northern parts of the country and has helped move people out of some environmentally fragile regions in the hope of restoring the ecosystem.

Western China accounts for 71 per cent of the country's total land area and abounds in natural resources.

It is the key base for China's agriculture, energy resources, raw materials and heavy industry.

The west is considered the key place for solving China's ecological problems, including water loss and soil erosion, desertification and sandstorms. Experts consider it of great importance to the sustainable development of the country as a whole.

The survey found that water loss and soil erosion in the west remains a problem, while desertification is intensifying.

By the end of 1999, the area suffering from water loss and soil erosion in the west - with the exception of Tibet - had surpassed 100 million hectares, making up 62.5 per cent of the entire area suffering from the same problem in China.

The make-up of forests in the region is becoming unbalanced as the area of economically oriented forests, such as those of fruit trees, is expanding rapidly while the area of natural forests and shelters is shrinking, the survey shows.

Such a flawed structure has made forests in the west easy prey of diseases and pests.

The area of woodland suffering from diseases and pests rose to 4.3 million hectares in the 1990s, almost triple the figure for the 1980s.

The 320 million hectares of grassland in the west, which account for 80 per cent of the country's total, have been getting worsening over the years, according to the survey.

The average area of grassland per sheep in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, for example, dropped from 3.3 hectares in the 1950s to 0.42 hectares in the 1990s.

Each person in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region has a mere 177 cubic metres of water on average, almost one-tenth of the world average.

Pollution in rivers in the west has made the situation worse. In Yunnan Province, water in 80 per cent of the monitoring spots along the province's 53 main rivers failed to meet the standard for drinking in 1999.

In the Minqin Basin in Gansu Province, the level of underground water is dropping down at a speed of between 20 and 50 centimetres each year due to overuse.

Environmental degradation has brought about more natural disasters and greater economic losses, according to the survey.

Drought and sandstorms frequently overwhelm China's Northwest while drought and flooding hit the Southwest.

The economic loss caused by sandstorms in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has soared to 1.1 billion yuan (US$133 million) in the 1990s, nearly 100 times that for the 1950s.

Soil degradation has blocked agricultural production and grazing in the west and made it difficult for the local population to shake off poverty.

Unreasonable human activity is a leading cause of environmental degradation in the west, the survey says.

The survey also points out that the level of environmental monitoring in the west lags far behind that elsewhere in China.