By Fu Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-06 15:27

Four years ago, former NPC deputy Xiong Guanglin, also from Guo's county, complained during an interview that government expenditure on healthcare in west China's rural areas such as Tongjiang was particularly low. More than 90 percent women in cities delivered their babies in hospitals. The reverse was the case in the countryside, with only 10 percent births recorded in hospitals. Though 55 percent of the people lived in the rural areas, they enjoyed only 30 percent of the country's healthcare resources.

The situation changed for the better in Tongjiang a year later, after it got sizable funds from the central government and channeled it to all the towns and villages in the county to build schools and hospitals, and improve infrastructure. "No child in my county today is behind the nine-year compulsory education scheme," Guo says. That is a very important development because "education can help a county shake off poverty".

Most of Tongjiang's farmers have benefited from the rural cooperative healthcare scheme. Lack of treatment for want of money was the cause of 26 percent of all deaths in the county in 2004. Today the rate is 5 percent.

True, the changes are encouraging, Guo says. But it's also true that the urban-rural income gap has been widening - an average urban resident earns 3.32 times more than his/her rural counterpart. And if we take the national absolute poverty line - income of less than 785 yuan ($110) a year - then 14.7 million farmers are still living below it.

Poverty is worse in areas such as Tongjiang, Guo says. "That's why we need more programs, more actions farmers need continuous support for the next three to five years."

Since people living in barren mountainous regions are poorer than their counterparts in the plains, it's important that they be relocated to more fertile or industrial areas. The mountains act as a natural barrier for people living in places such as Tongjiang to travel to cities and towns either to sell their produce or get a decent job. So the government, Guo says, is trying to relocate them along the very roads that some of them are building now.

One good news, according to recent studies, is that her county has a huge reserve of natural gas. This means the central government will pump out the gas and, in the process, generate employment and improve infrastructure in and around the area. The gas can be supplied to the economic hubs in the east and south to meet the rising demands there.

In exchange, "we are calling for measures to divert part of the profits from the resources-rich regions to the poorer areas," she says. "The government should come up with measures to compensate for ecology, too."

Rural development cannot be a year-exclusive scheme. Anything and everything happening in one year has to have a positive or negative impact on the next, as will last year's on this year's. The average inflation across the country last year was 4.8 percent, for instance, though in rural areas it was 5.4 percent against 4.5 percent in cities. The government has been trying to control inflation for some time now and Premier Wen made it his top priority in his Government Work Report yesterday, reflecting the administration's determination to keep prices of essentials as low as possible. But the effects of last year will take time to wither away.

What could make matters worse are the heavy snow in the central, eastern and southern parts of the country and the severe drought in the north. Together, they have damaged more than one-sixth of the country's total arable land - 121.8 million hectares in mid-2006.

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