HOHHOT - Authorities in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region plan to plant about 520,000 hectares of pine trees in Horqin, the country's largest sandy area, between 2011 and 2020.

The trees will be planted on desertified land near the city of Tongliao and help the region to resist sandstorms, a spokesman from the city government said on Sunday.

About half of the Horqin desert area is located in Tongliao, making the area a front line in the battle to stop the spread of desertification toward the municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin, the spokesman said.

The afforestation project expected to raise the city's forest coverage from 29 percent to 40 percent, the spokesman said.

The sandy soil of Horqin, which spreads over Inner Mongolia and northeast China's Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, covers an area of about 50,000 square km.

Horqin was a pasture area before overgrazing and droughts reduced it to a sandy desert. The desertification process began as early as Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) when emperors decided to cultivate the area. The desertification accelerated during the large-scale farming that took place in the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1978, the government decided to build a "Green Great Wall" in the country's northern areas to deal with water loss and soil erosion.