Participants to the trilateral environmental ministers meeting said Sunday.....Korea, Japan and China have agreed to set up a joint yellow dust monitoring network.

In the two day meeting that began Saturday in Seoul, Kim Myung-ja, Korea's environment minister, Japan's Minister of the Environment Hiroshi Ohki Ohki and Xie Zhenhua, director of China's State Administration of Environmental Protection concurred that aggressive steps were needed to control the dust storms from affecting the lives of citizens and industries in the three countries.

The ranking officials said that besides the construction of a joint monitoring apparatus, comprehensive workshops of experts and government authorities should be convened to root out the cause of the phenomena that is causing serious problems.

The three countries said that China will share real-time information on the dust clouds that arise from the arid Gobi Desert, while Korea will build a monitoring station to detect and follow its movement.

The participants then said that the workshop scheduled for May 3 in the Korean capital will touch on the most feasible way to curb this problem by carrying out concerted research and devising long term plans.