Foreign-Funded Projects Benefit Farmers in GuangxiFarmers in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region have benefited enormously from foreign- funded agricultural projects carried out in the past ten years.Sources from the regional department of agriculture said Guangxi has launched a group of agricultural projects with aid from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Program (WFP), and loans from the World Bank (WB), totaling 80.4 million U.S. dollars, aiming to raise local farmers' incomes. These projects include a fruit storage and fresh-preserving technology program in Guiping, a major production center of subtropical fruits like longans and litchis, the comprehensive agricultural development project in Shanglin, Mashan and Xiangzhou, and the red soil development project in Guangxi. For instance, foreign agricultural experts have been sent to Guiping to train local farmers on fruit production technologies since the FAO-aided fruit storage and fresh-preserving program was launched in 1998, which has led to improvements of quality and output of fruits and of economic returns of local fruit growers. Huang Yonghong, a farmer in Madong Township of Guiping City, said that with the technology taught by foreign agronomists, he earned more than 6,000 yuan (about 725 U.S. dollars) last year by selling fruits picked up from 100 litchi trees he has grown. In the meantime, with WB loans, more than 10,000 hectares of red soil slopes in Guangxi's 15 counties and cities have also been built into stretches of orchards. As a supporting project, two new factories for producing fruit juice will be finished within this year. After the factories are put into production, the economic benefits of farmers nearby will be greatly improved, said a local agricultural official. |
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