Jiangyong lifts families out of poverty and into the web

Jiangyong county in southern Hunan province is exploring new strategies to tackle poverty, including introducing e-commerce trade.

In the past, Jiangyong has suffered from inconvenient transportation and a relative lack of information, which has hindered the sales of local agricultural products.

Since last year, the government has built 96.2 kilometers of highways, making 32 poverty-ridden villages and their agricultural products accessible to larger markets.

Apart from infrastructure projects, the local government also introduced the concept of Internet Plus to the villages and encouraged e-commerce trade as an alternative way to market locally grown produce and other products.

Jiangyong also set up Hunan's first official online county-level e-commerce platform, Wuxiang, and formed partnerships with e-commerce giants such as Tmall and JD.com.

To better serve the e-commerce trade and grant access to the latest market information, Jiangyong's local government has thrown 28.5 million yuan ($4.1 million) into a broadband program to provide villages with high-speed fiber optic broadband and 2.5 million yuan into related training programs for people below the poverty line.

So far, 4,860 people have benefited from the free training.

The county is concerned with the quality of its products and has established a complete system to track products and to monitor the manufacturing process.

"We aim to take targeted measurements of poverty alleviation to make full use of the market.

"We want to make sure that the poor population benefits from the investments and learns from successful cases," said Tang Derong, head of Jiangyong.

Feng Shanfu, who runs an online shop selling drawstring bags, said that he had dozens of orders every day.

"Annual turnover reached 600,000 yuan and my income has exceeded 80,000 yuan," Feng said.

Since 2015, about 7,460 residents once living below the poverty line have participated in the e-commerce trade. A total of 62 of 84 low-income villages have set up their own online shops and e-commerce service stations.

Thanks to the online trade, the price of oranges and clementines have increased by 3.2 yuan and 0.8 yuan per kilogram, respectively.

Total turnover reached 130 million yuan in 2015.

The county has reduced its poverty-stricken population by 10,362, lowering the population percentage below the poverty line to 12.88 percent from 36.94 percent last year.

(China Daily 12/22/2016 page7)