Brothers in arms

For more than two decades, the survival instinct has driven the Wang brothers deeper and deeper into their mountainous home region to turn minefields into fields suitable for crop cultivation.

In Balihe, a village in the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao autonomous prefecture of Yunnan province, each resident was allocated a mere 0.2 hectares of farmland because the minefields prevented local farmers from using large areas of arable land.

"We farmers have a natural attachment to our farmland. If I can't reclaim the land, then neither will my children or grandchildren, and then this land will be abandoned forever," said Wang Kaixue, who has cleared nearly 6.7 hectares of farmland since 1992.