Farmers Escape Poverty by Terracing Barren Hills in Chinese Province

No one can fault the farmers of the remote yellow mountains of northern China for failing to think big.

For generations, it was all they could do just to coax crops of millet and buckwheat on the steep, barren hills ribbed with gullies--the same “yellow earth” country where the Communists set up a base and grew to power in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Then, two years ago, the World Bank and the Chinese government offered a $250-million loan to create terraced fields.

Farmers swinging pickaxes and shovels leveled the slopes and carefully built retaining walls of straw and earth that look as smooth as cement. Bulldozers notched the most difficult slopes.

Now the fields are flat, and water, soil and fertilizer no longer run off in the rain. With bigger crops, thousands of families in this part of Shaanxi province have escaped the severe poverty that bound them for generations.

The government is promoting this kind of change in remote inland areas, where most of China’s poorest people live. People here have missed most of the benefits of rapid growth in the booming coastal areas.

At least 70 million of China’s 1.2 billion people are so poor that they do not have enough food and clothing. In the last year, the country’s leaders and its state-run press have set a new goal: ending severe poverty by 2000.

An important part of the strategy has been the World Bank’s low-interest loan program. The funds are meant to bring development to the world’s poorest people. China has been one of the biggest borrowers, receiving more than $1.5 billion since 1986.

World Bank officials say the funds generally have been well used. In Gansu, in northwestern China west of Shaanxi, the loans have provided irrigation on arid plains. In the southwest, the money has brought health care, roads and training in more efficient farm methods.

In Shaanxi and neighboring provinces, the answer is terraces.

The plateau of loess--a fine-grained, yellow-brown loam--covers an area the size of France and is one of China’s poorest places.

In the early years of this century, the struggle for survival was so fierce in Shaanxi that many people turned to banditry in desperation. Rival warlord armies clashed and plundered. Millions of people died of starvation.

Mao Tse-tung and the Communist Party arrived in Shaanxi in 1935, set up headquarters in Yan’an and fought two enemies--the invading Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Meantime, the Communists won over Shaanxi farmers by distributing the property of landlords to the poor.

People living in some of these hills today recall subsisting on sweet potatoes and grain husks as recently as the late 1970s, when China embarked on its economic changes. But the reforms did not completely put an end to the fight for food.

In places such as the Houjiagou Valley, in northern Shaanxi, local officials give the terraces credit for that.

After the harvest, when the pale, yellow earth of the fields and walls blends with no break of vegetation, the 500-foot-tall hills look more like ancient monuments than farms.

From the bumpy dirt road that winds up the valley, the hills seem empty. Houses are hard to spot in the strong sun because they are caves fronted with stones cut from the same yellow rock.

“It’s going to be a tremendous difference. It already is,” said Zhao Dongping, a 32-year-old farm woman interviewed in her new home--two tunnels set side by side. A 1958 portrait of Mao surrounded by beaming farmers and chest-high stalks of millet is framed on one wall.

Before the terraces, the typical farmer in the valley earned about 300 yuan ($36) a year, well below the poverty level of 440 yuan, said Gao Shuhua, a World Bank official. The higher crop yields have increased income to about 600 yuan and the goal of 1,000 yuan is well within reach, he said.

Electricity, affordable for the first time, is being installed. More of the region’s traditional cave houses are being built, each fronted by a semicircle of latticed windows.

A sign in big, red characters proclaims from one of the terraced hills: “Grass hats on the mountains, a belt of trees around the middle and fields of food surrounding the villages.”

It refers to how the fields are used. On the highest fields, grass is grown for fodder. A band of trees below that provides wood for heating and helps prevent erosion. Food is grown on lower fields.

The World Bank says its loan was crucial to the terracing project, which will directly help 280,000 households.

“Some farmers built their own small terraces, but they couldn’t do it on such a huge scale,” said Zhang Yi, the World Bank project manager.

During economic reforms under senior leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, Deng proclaimed that “to get rich is glorious” but stressed that some people would get rich first before common prosperity could be achieved.

As Deng’s health fades and his influence wanes, an important group in the ruling Communist Party has started to criticize the social problems--crime, income disparities, mass migration--unleashed by rapid economic growth.

They say development aid must be funneled to the central and western regions and incentives offered to lure businesses inland from the booming coastal regions.

For the near future, however, farming remains the only source of income for millions of people in remote areas.

For the farmers of the Houjiagou Valley, flat fields yield what local officials call a comfortable life--enough food on the table, a little savings in the bank, and television, or at least electric lights, in every cave.