Regional pairing pays off, rewriting lives

Local to global

As a prime example, Juncao — a Chinese technology that uses specific grasses instead of wood to grow mushrooms and control soil erosion — served as a flagship initiative of the Fujian-Ningxia cooperation and has now spread to 118 countries, offering pragmatic insights for global poverty reduction.

In 1997, Lin Zhanxi, the inventor of Juncao, introduced this drought-resistant crop to Xihaigu, a heavily eroded and resource-scarce region in Ningxia. Despite facing an unfamiliar, arid landscape, Lin's team adapted their years of poverty alleviation experience to help local farmers build a thriving industry from scratch.

His daughter, Lin Dongmei, vice-dean of the International College of Juncao Science at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, said that the technology's adaptation in Ningxia was a crucial turning point. "Building a sustainable industry in an ecologically fragile area with no initial resources provided a replicable template for arid and desertified regions worldwide," she said.

The core secret behind this global success lies in being simple and universally beneficial. To achieve this, Lin Zhanxi established a three-step approach: ensuring the technology is simple enough for people to understand at first glance, learn quickly, and succeed on their first try.

This grassroots success has since improved local livelihoods and fostered sustainable growth across the globe. Qiu, the researcher, said that the core lesson is that anti-poverty efforts must focus on capacity-building and adapting to local conditions, while organically combining ecological governance with industrial growth.

This offers a valuable inspiration for the Global South that the Chinese approach is not merely about material aid, but a systematic methodology that transforms labor advantages into internal driving forces, and ecological burdens into green wealth, he said.

It exemplifies China's Global Development Initiative by helping developing nations forge a sustainable path that balances economic, ecological and social benefits through win-win technological cooperation, he added.

Lu Yan contributed to this story.

Contact the writers at zhangyi1@chinadaily.com.cn