Abstract

Soil erosion is one of the most serious ecologic and environmental issues in the Upper Reaches of the Yangtze River, China. Currently, each person occupies the farmland area only 0.81 Mu (1ha=15Mu) in this region, which is closed to 0.8 Mu (about 0.053 ha) warning line that was put forward by United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). According to statistics, hilly and steep arable land near 150,000,000 Mu, and 35,000,000 Mu farmlands > 25°, soil erosion reaches 900,000,000 tons each year in the Uppers of Yangtze River.

As a kind of natural process, soil erosion is certainly inevitable, whereas the state of erosion expanding, spreading and worsen rapidly is a result of activities of the mankind. The research shows that soil erosion mainly came from slope-land cultivation in this region, which is accounting for about 60% of the total erosion quantity. So, More attention should be paid on the research of mechanism of the human system, especially of mountain poverty. In this paper, based on field survey data and statistical data, a model has been built to illustrate mechanism of soil erosion on human dimension.

 

Keywords: Soil erosion; poverty; mechanism; the Upper Reaches of Yangtze River