Shanghai officials lifting villagers out of poverty

Li Guowen is one of many Shanghai officials sent to poverty-stricken regions to help the people there fight poverty. China has vowed to wipe out absolute poverty by 2020.

In August 2018, he was sent to Zheng’an County in Zunyi City, southwest China’s Guizhou Province. It was the only county in Zunyi not yet removed from the list of impoverished areas.

However, the local government will likely announce victory in its battle against poverty early this year, Li said. 

Now temporary deputy head of Zheng’an, the 42-year-old told Shanghai Daily that to achieve this goal, he and other officials from Shanghai had created a Zheng’an model for poverty alleviation.

Benefiting from his experience in management as deputy general manager of Shanghai Yangpu Technology and Innovation Group, he led locals to focus on three indigenous agricultural products — free-range chicken, square bamboo shoots and wild papaya — taking advantage of the mountainous area’s ecological strengths.

The model aims to help Zheng’an establish a complete industrial chain — from the farms in the county to dining tables in Shanghai — by attracting a group of companies from Shanghai to participate in the industries, covering production, transport and sales, rather than just giving money or building new farms for local villagers.

“I found that what the remote area lacked most were enterprises and entrepreneurs. It is very difficult for local cooperatives to explore markets. Shanghai has enormous business opportunities and has opened market doors for Zheng’an. But the problem was that companies in Zheng’an and Shanghai could hardly communicate in business due to the big gap between business concepts and marketing consciousness,” Li said.

“I think officials who help people in impoverished areas essentially serve as a bridge. They should be able to speak two languages. For me, they are Shanghai dialect and the local Guizhou language. We help companies from Shanghai to learn about Zheng’an’s ecological resources, while allowing firms from Zheng’an to know the Shanghai market better. Only in this way, can docking with producers, suppliers and sellers be successful.”

Ti Gong

Chickens reared in Zheng’an can roam freely and roost in trees, making them much safer, tastier and more nutritious than broiler versions.

However, consumers in Shanghai, thousands of miles away, knew little about this though safety and taste were precisely what they were concerned about most.

Through his matchmaking efforts, Shanghai Shenghua Food Co, a leading poultry product supplier in Shanghai, registered a subsidiary company in Zheng’an. Its chicken-raising farm in Zheng’an’s Xieba Gelao and Miao Autonomous Township can produce 300,000 chickens for slaughter a year.

Li helped the company come up with a brand name of Ban Mu Ji to promote their free-range chicken. Ban Mu Ji means each chicken can enjoy a roaming area of around half a mu. One mu is around 667 square meters.

The company changed local breeding methods. Shenghua demonstrated the benefits of scientific breeding to local farmers who earlier thought raising chickens was just a matter of feeding them corn. Shenghua can get baby chicks at a third of their price by virtue of its economies of scale, and it only takes Shenghua four months to raise a 4-kilogram chicken, compared with the local farmers’ six months.

“Besides nurturing local firms, I think what is more important is attracting more investment from Shanghai or other parts of the country. It’s like China calling for foreign investment in the early stages of the country’s reform and opening-up. That not only brought capital and markets to less-developed areas, but also advanced mechanisms and talent,” Li said.

“Shenghua’s farm in Zheng’an is more like a direct-sale store. It cooperates with local farm cooperatives, teaching them how to breed in a scientific way and turn them to ‘franchises,’ and then driving local farmers to get involved.

“We also encourage supply chain management companies, logistics firms, e-commerce platforms and supermarkets from Shanghai to take part in the farm-to-table industry.

“Once this market-oriented industry is built up, it is more sustainable and can switch from a blood-transfusion method to making blood. I hope that after I finish my poverty relief work here, this industry can continue to develop,” Li added.

Xu Qing / SHINE

With support from agriculture authorities in Guizhou and Shanghai, Shenghua got Guizhou’s first and only permit for live poultry to enter Shanghai.

Live poultry from other parts of the nation are banned from the city’s retail market as per regulations. But suppliers from other parts of the country with permits can trade live birds in local wholesale markets or slaughter them in city slaughterhouses.

With this permit, Shenghua can transport live fowl from Zheng’an directly to its slaughterhouse in Shanghai’s suburban Fengxian District and make frozen chicken. Unlike other frozen chicken, its cold-processed birds, which only have a shelf-life of six days, have the freshness of live chickens.

On October 17, the National Poverty Relief Day, Li and his team took part in exhibitions in Shanghai featuring products from areas the city helps with poverty relief. He was excited to see that the first batch of nearly 4,000 Ban Mu Ji chickens sold out on the third day.

“Shanghai residents prefer live poultry as they think it is fresher and tastier. The chilled chicken produced by Shenghua allows finicky eaters in Shanghai to taste authentic and fresher free-range chicken from Guizhou for the first time,” Li said.

“Supply of our chicken falling short of demand in the Shanghai market is a good enough reason for introducing Shanghai’s leading companies to Guizhou and Guizhou’s agricultural products to Shanghai,” he said.

Li said chicken production would be expanded to 1 million in 2020 when some 1,000 people would be lifted out of poverty.

He said he would continue his efforts to tackle poverty in Zheng’an through industrial cooperation. “We will apply the Zheng’an practice to more industries such as tea and guitar-making in the future.”

Shanghai has paired with Zunyi in 531 poverty reduction programs since 2016 and has helped seven counties or cities, 213 villages and a total of 105,200 people escape poverty.

Xu Qing / Ti Gong