In Yan'an City in the central part on China's Loess Plateau, more than 300,000 farmers are busying themselves by digging pits for seedlings on their terrace fields.

The farmers have decided to give up crop raising and shift to planting trees on the plateau. Meanwhile, airplanes are used to drop seeds for a massive afforestation program on barren mountains in other places in west China.

The tree planting campaign marks a surge of strategic development in west China, which covers nine interior provinces and autonomous regions and one municipality spanning from Shaanxi in the northwest to Yunnan in the southwest.

It is an important move launched by the Chinese government to check the increasingly threatened ecological environment in the west and to achieve its sustained development strategy in the next century.

Zeng Peiyan, minister in charge of the State Development Planning Commission, noted that enhancing ecological construction and environmental protection is vital for the strategic development in west China.

The central government encourages farmers in the west to turn their low-yield farmland to grassland or woodland. Farmers who give up one hectare of the farmland will get 1,500 kg grain in compensation along with some additional funds for purchasing seedlings and grass seeds.

Tuo Haiming, a farmer in Wangjiagou Village of Zichang County in Yan'an, has planted hundreds of pear and apricots trees. "It's a wise policy that the government aids us with food and funds only to make our hills green by planting trees. Why not go ahead with it?" he said.

"A couple of years later, our wild hills will be turned into hills with fruit and flowers, then they will become our treasure chests."

West China covers 56 percent of the country's land area and its population accounts for 23 percent of the national total. Back to the period between Han and Tang dynasties (206 B.C.-907 A.D.), it was home to dense forests and luxuriant vegetation.

Nevertheless, increasing ecological deterioration in the region in the past centuries, especially the past few decades, has resulted in rapid expansion of deserts at an annual rate of more than 2,000 sq km.

More years than not, the Yellow River dries up at its 700-km low reaches to the estuary, which poses a serious threat to social and economic development in both western and eastern regions of China.

The western region on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and Yellow River serves as a protective screen for the ecological environment in China. Soil erosion in the region has become the most serious issue in the country's environmental protection endeavor.

China now has started ecological conservation projects in the west including virgin forests protection programs, soil erosion control programs, water conservancy and irrigation projects, ecological farming projects and desertification control projects. Tree felling has been banned in the upper valleys of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers.

In the coming decade, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces and four other provinces and autonomous regions will jointly invest 120 billion yuan (14.5 billion US dollars) to conserve the forests in the upper valley of the Yangtze; Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is to spend five billion yuan to harness the Tarim River; in Shaanxi Province, the state will invest 20 billion yuan to replant trees and grass on low-yield farmland.

Hu Angang, an ecologist and economist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is confident of the future in west China, According to him, actual state investment in ecological protection programs in the next ten years might exceed the planned figure of 200 billion yuan (24 billion US dollars).

From now on, he said, the dearth of ecological projects in west China must change, and a new era will be ushered in for China to tackle its ecological deterioration.

In fact, in the past two decades, China has had rich experiences in eliminating ecological problems in the western region. Taking advantage of state-of-the-art technology, China has curbed soil erosion on the Loess Plateau from deteriorating with many man-made oases in desert regions.

Especially in the past two years, major breakthroughs have been made in water resources exploration in arid areas in the west. According to experts' predictions, the underground water storage for annual exploitation has reached 16.3 billion cu m. The rich water resources will benefit the green projects in west China.

It is the government's goal that by 2020, the forest coverage rates on the upper reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers will be increased to 45 and 27 percent from the current 22 and 10 percent respectively. And by the middle of the next century, west China will boast a beautiful landscape.