A farmer runs a chicken farm in Houhu village.

Lands rendered worthless by mining in Anhui province are being put to new use, giving farmers a fresh source of livelihood. Zhang Yue reports.

While for most Chinese the Spring Festival is a time off from work, for Zong Xuelin it is the busiest time of the year. The 46-year-old is a greenhouse strawberry cultivator in Huainan, Anhui province. And greenhouse strawberries are typically harvested between December and May.

Since early December, Zong has rarely taken a day's break. Every morning he rides to the nearest market to sell his harvest of strawberries from the 36 greenhouses he runs with his four brothers.

"My strawberries are very popular," Zong says. "Almost every day my two trucks sell out to retailers in less than an hour."

Prices for fruit are typically high at festival time, and on New Year's Eve, Zong earned 3,000 yuan ($455) by selling his strawberries at 14 yuan per kilogram.

It is hard to imagine that two years ago, the land where Zong grows his strawberries, was laid waste by years of mining. Panji district of Huainan city is a large coal mining area; the 600 sq km district has been dotted with mines and coal-based enterprises since the 1970s.

So far, mining has submerged 2,300 hectares of land and 52,000 local residents have had to be relocated.

In Zong's village of Houhu, decades of mining have left its environment in a shambles. Since the 1990s, mining has blocked the water channels, leaving villagers with little land suitable for cultivation.

Zong's lands began to sink in the early 1990s and even his two-story house would fill with water whenever it rained.

In 2003, Zong and his family finally lost their land on which they grew wheat and rice, which brought them an annual income of around 4,000 yuan.

To make a living, Zong started a brick factory and ran it for six years. But the farmer-at-heart always wanted to go back to his land someday.

Tang Kai, who has been tasked with the revitalization of submerged lands in Panji since early 2010, says, "We realized that there is no reason to abandon land while seeking coal."

"This land could still be put to other uses, like growing cash crops," he says.

In 2008, the village was chosen as part of a pilot project to save land destroyed by mining.

Huainan city, with 15.3 billion tons of coal, accounts for 70 percent of the reserves in Anhui province. It provides electricity to Shanghai, Zhejiang province, as well as other places in the Yangtze River delta.

"About a fifth of the electricity in Shanghai relies on the power produced in Huainan coal mines," says Wu Jinsong from the city's power supply bureau.

While coal made the city one of the best-developed in Anhui in the 1990s, its over-exploitation left 163 sq km of its land under water by the end of 2009.

But over the past year, some 6,700 hectares of land in Houhu village has survived the impact of mining.

The local authorities plan to divide the village into 10 themed sections by the end of 2012, featuring greenhouse fruit and aquaculture.

Zong and his brothers rented 40 of the greenhouses established by the government, each for 1,000 yuan ($152) per year, in early 2010.

"Those who hesitated to invest then now envy me," Zong says. "My strawberries sell for about 20 yuan per kilogram on the market."

But Huainan is not resting on its laurels. It has even bigger plans.

By 2050, a third of the city - 682 sq km - is estimated to get submerged because of mining.

"But we will work to connect the area with the Huaihe River, and build perhaps the largest aquatic park in East China. The city will find yet another way to reinvent itself," local official Hu Donghui says.

(China Daily 03/02/2011 page20)