Food delivery boom facilitates China's anti-poverty drive

BEIJING - Booming food delivery services in China has propelled the country's anti-poverty campaign as more rural people come to the cities for delivery jobs, a report showed.

About 77 percent of 2.7-million-plus food delivery people working for delivery service giant Meituan-Dianping come from rural areas, and about 670,000 of them are from impoverished regions, according to a report from the company.

Over half of them work less than four hours each day and nearly 30 percent of the food delivery people pocket over 5,000 yuan ($741.5) each month.

More than half of them chose to work in their own province, which is most notable in Central China's Henan province.

Economic heavyweight Guangdong province has the largest number of food delivery people, followed by Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai and Beijing.

China's food delivery market has been growing at a double-digit pace in recent years and is expected to have exceeded 240 billion yuan in 2018, according to the market research platform iiMedia Research.