In China’s persistent efforts to fight against desertification (沙漠化), Wang Wenbiao, better known as the “Son of the Desert,” is playing an exemplary role.
Wang is the chairman of the Elion Resources Group, a Chinese green enterprise. He lives in the Kubuqi Desert (库布齐沙漠) in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The constant expansion of the desert used to force many people to migrate, while those who stayed faced poverty and hardship. When Wang was young, his dream was to leave the desert as well. However, for the past 30 years, as chairman of the Elion Resources Group, Wang has dedicated his life and work to the battle against desertification.
Wang was first motivated by entrepreneurship. In 1988, he gave up his stable job as a government clerk and ventured into business, managing a near-bankrupt salt company on the edge of the desert. Despite the rich salt reserves in the lake beside his factory, he constantly worried about the company’s operations as the desert was swallowing the lake. Wang set up a special fund and assigned one-third of his staff to plant trees surrounding the lake. His plan worked, and the salt company managed to make a small profit.
However, since there was no road through the desert to the nearest train station, which was 67 km away, all the salt had to be transported via a 350 km route. High transport costs further squeezed the already thin profit margins, which made the salt company hard to sustain.
In 1999, thanks to government efforts to tame the desert, a 115 km highway through the middle of the desert opened to traffic. But unfortunately, the highway was quickly swallowed up by sand. Wang realized that to do any business in the desert, he first needed to deal with the sand.
He renamed his company Elion, focused on curbing desertification, and developed a business model to generate both economic and ecological benefits. The game-changer in his business model was licorice (甘草) farming because licorice grows well in the desert and is one of the most widely used medicinal herbs in traditional Chinese medicine. Moreover, the plant works well in curbing desertification. The bacteria living in the plant’s roots have an effect that increases soil fertility.
Elion encouraged local people to grow licorice, providing them with licorice seedlings (幼苗), training, and other support. When they harvested the roots, Wang’s company bought them at a fair price. Through this business model, the desert changed. When viewed from afar, a green finish line now stretches across the desert. As a result, local residents also made money and became rich.
Elion’s desert business now covers healthcare, environmental protection, clean energy, farming and livestock (牲畜), tourism, and animal feed processing. To acknowledge his great achievement in combatting desertification, UNEP honored Wang with the Champions of the Earth Award.