A villager from Zhegui Village, Anlong County of southwest China's Guizhou Province picks dendrobium officinale flowers, June. 8, 2020. (Xinhua/Shi Qiangui)
BEIJING, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- The traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) material industry has powered the poverty alleviation of southwest China's Guizhou Province as a featured and advantageous industry of the province.
As of November this year, the TCM material industry in Guizhou has boosted the income increase of 247,000 people, with per capita income increase reaching 5,000 yuan, and provided 351,200 jobs each stable for more than 200 days.
The sound ecological system in the province creates favorable conditions for the growth of medicinal materials, and makes the province a renowned main production base of quality medicinal materials and dual-use materials for food and medicine.
According to a national survey on Chinese materia medica resources, Guizhou boasts 5,304 species of medicinal plant resources.
In recent years, the province has vigorously developed the TCM material industry by promoting the connected model of "enterprises plus bases plus cooperatives plus farmers", helping farmers, especially the poor ones, gain more benefits from the development of the industry.
As one of the first counties selected as the "big county of TCM materials cultivation in Guizhou Province", Anlong County has taken TCM materials as a key industry to aid poverty relief, adjusting the structure of agricultural industries and leveraging its mountains and dam areas to develop honeysuckle, dendrobium officinale and other TCM materials.
Anlong County Xicheng Xiushu Agriculture and Forestry Co., Ltd., a private company founded September 2012 in Anlong County, has taken the "enterprises plus bases plus cooperatives plus farmers" model and had over 800 rural households, including 652 registered impoverished households, to develop the dendrobium officinale industry.
By the end of 2019, the company has built a imitation wild dendrobium officinale planting base of 6,200 mu (about 4.13 million square meters) in two villages of the county, and the base has become the largest original ecological dendrobium officinale planting base in China.
The company has employed more than 260 people to work at this planting base.
If the staff achieve full attendance in the harvest season, picking flowers and branches can bring over 10,000 yuan of income a year to them, and plus wages, their annual income can exceed 50,000 yuan, said the company's administrative manager Ma Yongyan.
(Editedby Gu Shanshan with Xinhua Silk Road, gushanshan.1987@163.com)
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