China's rural vitalization, modern agriculture undergird anti-poverty success

On a drizzly fresh morning, Lu Panfeng, 45, was inspecting and recording the conditions of wheat in the city of Huai'an, east China's Jiangsu Province. Once utterly obscure, he was awarded as a national role model for efforts in poverty alleviation at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last month.

During the past eight years, as the Party chief of Fengnian village in Huai'an, once a poverty-stricken village, Lu has worked out a busy schedule to lead his villagers out of abject deprivation by developing local agricultural collectives and distinctive industries.

In 2020, the collective incomes of the village notched up 1 million yuan (about 153,000 U.S. dollars), quadrupling that of two years ago.

Daizhuang Village was once one of the poorest villages in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province. Before 2003, villagers' per capita annual income was less than 3,000 yuan (about 460 USD).

After a field investigation in 2003, Zhao Yafu, an agricultural expert, decided to help the village fight poverty through organic farming. Since then, on more than 200 days out of a year, he led villagers to the fields to check the growth of organic rice.

More and more farmers started to engage in organic farming. At present, more than 8,500 mu (about 560 hectares) of agricultural and forestry land in the village and surrounding areas have adopted new ecological technologies.

In 2020, villagers' per capita net income was about 34,000 yuan (about 5,200 USD), with the collective income of the village reaching 4.35 million yuan (about 668,600 USD).

Peng Rui, a 41-year-old university lecturer in Jiangsu's city of Suzhou, spends most of his spare time in Shushan Village as a designer in rural planning.

In 2012, the village committee invited the teaching staff in Suzhou University of Science and Technology to engage in village planning and Peng was among them.

The village with over 400 households has its specialties of tea, pears and red bayberries. "I felt like Shushan has so many good natural resources, just a pearl covered in dust," Peng said.

Shushan is now like a magnet that has attracted two coffee shops, 13 homestays and even a five-star international hotel chain. Villagers at Shushan sold 55 million yuan worth of agricultural products in 2020. Their per capita income exceeded 45,000 yuan.

Over the last eight years, China's final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents living below the subsistence level declared poverty-free. The country then met the poverty eradication target set out in the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule.

To ensure that those who have been lifted out of poverty will not be snapped back into impoverishment, China will implement strategies including rural vitalization in an all-around manner during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) period, safeguarding the sound development of modern agriculture and increasing income for farmers.