Farmers Reaping New Agricultural Riches

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, January 09, 2003

Farmers Reaping New Agricultural Riches

On the wall of his well-decorated two-story home-office there is an eye-catching photograph: Liu Aiping shaking hands with Hu Jintao, who is now the general secretary of the Communist Party of China.

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On the wall of his well-decorated two-story home-office there is an eye-catching photograph: Liu Aiping shaking hands with Hu Jintao, who is now the general secretary of the Communist Party of China.

"I met the then Vice-President Hu in 1998 when I was in Beijing. This is my favourite picture," Liu said proudly.

Liu was elected as one of the "Top 10 Outstanding Young Farmers of China" that year and was received by the then vice-president.

The 40-year-old from Daqiao Village in Hunan Province's Hengdong County has worked his small pig farm into a renowned breeding group with an annual business volume of 40 million yuan (US$4.8 million).

Liu started raising pigs 20 years ago after failing the college entrance examination.

He took advantage of widely available correspondence courses and studied epidemic prevention, feed nutrition and breeding improvements.

"I also learned to use computers and got onto the Internet, which is how I keep in touch with some of my clients today. It is really convenient," he said.

Behind his house are scores of rectangle pig folds divided by one-metre-tall cement walls.

Liu's company provides piglets, feed and services to individual farmers who raise pigs on their own properties.

It also organizes the buy-back and sales of the pigs, which rids the farmers of the worry of selling the animals.

Molded on the local authorities' "company plus farm households" model, the Hunan Aiping Breeding Group has united more than 3,600 individual farmers and sells more than 100,000 pigs a year.

"Aiping" is now a trusted brandname for pork in local and overseas markets.

There is a host of successful farmers-turned private entrepreneurs in Hengdong County, local officials say. And Liu is not the most successful.

There is a popular old saying, "When crops are good in Hunan and Hubei, the whole country will not be short of grain," and the inland remains the nation's top rice producer.

Hunan is also famous as the home of modern China's revolutionaries including late Chairman Mao Zedong.

Partly because of its geographic location and heavy fetters of the past planned economy, the inland province found itself lagging behind its coastal cousins in the first round of reforms and opening up, which started two decades ago.

With more than 70 per cent of its 65 million people living in rural communities, the agricultural province is a crucial point for improving farmers' livelihoods.

The government of Hunan has adopted the strategy of promoting industry, industrialized development of agriculture and urbanization of rural areas, which has shown promise in recent years.

The industrialized development of agriculture includes the developing of industrialized planting and breeding and processing of farm produce and other related non-agricultural sectors in rural areas.

This mode of developing agriculture helps push farmers into the market, optimizing the agricultural production mix and enhancing management scale.

It also helps transfer a surplus labour force to other fields like the construction and service sectors, said Du Yuanming, director of the Hunan Provincial Agricultural Office.

In the past 13 years, farmers' per capita income has increased greatly from 558 yuan (US$67) in 1989 to 2,299 yuan (US$277) in 2001 in Hunan. The poverty-stricken population has shrunk from 4.32 million in 1990 to 1.1 million in 2001, Du said.

According to statistics from the local rural work office, farmers now have more income channels and an improved quality of life.

The proportion of income from household management to total income has decreased notably from 90.4 per cent in 1989 to 59.7 per cent in 2001.

"Evaluated by the basic standards of xiaokang life issued by the National Bureau of Statistics in the mid-1990s, Hunan has achieved a high degree with 91.4 per cent and realized xiaokang, or a moderate well-off life on the whole," Du said.

Although Liu is a success, he also devotes his time to helping others and plays a leading role in guiding local people through the pig breeding process.

Within his team, there are 378 households that each produce 100 pigs a year. There are even people from Guangxi, Hubei and Hainan coming to learn from him.

Chen Zheng, a laid-off worker from nearby Shuikoushan County who got involved in pig-raising only a year ago, came to thank Liu at the end of last year.

"Teacher Liu brought me to this business, lent me veterinary medicine, pig feed on credit and helped me to sell the pigs. I sold out 1,600 fine-breed pigs this year," Chen said ardently.

"Were it not for Liu's help, I could not have my well-off life that I live today." (China Daily news)

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