Nation’s poverty alleviation inspires world economies

A 20-day trip to China in August was inspiring enough for Cecille Aldueza-Virtucio to visualize a plan to improve her cooperative and help its farmers lead better lives.

The managing director of an egg cooperative in San Jose, Batangas, the Philippines, had a tight China schedule: attending lectures, taking field trips to agricultural cooperatives and garnering experience from Chinese experts on rural development and poverty reduction.

“If we follow some of the examples here, we can improve the lives of the greater Philippine people,” Aldueza-Virtucio said.

A revelation from the trip, she said, was the importance of a beautiful countryside with a good living environment, and ensuring fair responsibilities for authorities, communities, the private sector and residents during the povertyalleviation process.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, 16.1 percent of Philippine families were living below the poverty line last year.

“President Xi Jinping has shown us how we can enable shared prosperity for all,” she said. “When we return, we will act on some of the experience, and I will pilot it in my own municipality.”

Aldueza-Virtucio was taking part in one of the more than 2,000 tours of this kind that the Chinese government arranges annually to share its experience in areas such as poverty alleviation and agricultural production.

The programs stem from Xi’s pledge in a speech at the United Nations in New York in 2015 to provide 120,000 opportunities and 150,000 scholarships for citizens of other developing countries to receive training and education in China over the following five years.

China has reduced the number of rural Chinese living below the poverty line from nearly 99 million in late 2012 to 16.6 million by the end of last year, officials said. It has set a goal of lifting all impoverished rural Chinese from poverty by 2020.

In 2011, China set the poverty line for its rural population at a net per capita annual income of 2,300 yuan ($324). The poverty line has since been adjusted each year for consumer inflation.

China, the world’s largest developing country, has shown strong commitment to South-South cooperation, scaling up efforts to help other developing countries attain food security and poverty reduction.

Xi said at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation that China will support Africa in achieving general food security by 2030, work with Africa to formulate and implement a cooperation program on agricultural modernization and carry out 50 agricultural assistance programs.

China will provide 1 billion yuan in emergency humanitarian food assistance to African countries affected by natural disasters, send 500 senior agricultural experts to the continent and train young researchers in agricultural science and entrepreneurs in agribusiness.

Leaders and experts from many developing countries have seen China’s success in tackling poverty as an important reference for their own efforts.

Laotian President Bounnhang Vorachit, who is also general secretary of the Central Committee of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, expressed hope during a visit to China in April that his country might borrow from China’s poverty alleviation experiences.

“The local successful practices reflect General Secretary Xi Jinping’s idea of targeted poverty reduction and the Communist Party of China Central Committee’s purpose of benefiting the people,” he said while visiting a government relocation project in Fujian province.

“There is still a large povertystricken population in Laos, so we will bring China’s poverty-alleviation experiences and measures back to our country,” he told China Central Television.

Kakudi Kabemba Beaudouin, an agricultural expert from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said China and the DRC share a similar historical background.

“China has accumulated lots of experience in poverty reduction and agricultural development, which we hope can be transferred to our country,” Beaudouin said during a study tour to China in August.

The DRC, in its bid to develop itself into an emerging market economy before 2030, must prioritize the development of agriculture in order to solve its food security problem.

“But we require a catalyst to achieve that. We look forward to a solution offered by China,” he said.

DRC farmers have received agricultural equipment such as threshers, fertilizer spreaders and fruit harvesting machines through a cooperative program between China, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the DRC. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs sent 13 experts to the DRC to share China’s experience in poverty reduction and agricultural production.

Stanis Mbongo Mbantshi, a Food and Agriculture Organization project manager in the DRC’s capital, Kinshasa, said Xi has come up with important insights into China’s rural development and closing the urban-rural divide.

China’s rural vitalization strategy, in particular, will serve as a reference for the DRC in balancing urban and rural development, Mbantshi said.

Alan Piazza, a former World Bank rural development economist, said other countries should note how China became the most successful country at poverty reduction in history.

“Because it’s only when we understand how China achieved this poverty eradication that China’s lessons can then begin to be transferred to other developing countries that so desperately need help,” Piazza said.

“Many Western academics say it was all overall economic growth (that led to China’s success in poverty reduction). But it was so much more than that,” he said.

Piazza gave the example of China’s national poverty registration program — a system that registers all rural households living below the poverty line. The measure, introduced in 2014, has played a key role in poverty reduction, he said.

Piazza said Brazil introduced a similar program inspired by China’s experience, even though it was not easy for many other developing countries to establish similar programs.

It is important to put China’s experience into context, rather than simply borrowing from it.

“China has extraordinary implementation capacity. When China decides they want to do this, it gets done,” he said.

He added that the next step for China should be to share its expertise on poverty reduction in a more effective way.

“China has made sharing its experience on development an important part of its cooperation with developing countries,” said Li Xiaoyun, a professor of rural development and poverty reduction at China Agricultural University.

He said that global poverty reduction efforts now face two major challenges.

The first is absolute poverty, a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. And the second is relative poverty. “China’s targeted poverty reduction policy has provided important experience in this area,” Li said.

The key is to eliminate factors that result in poverty, provide affordable healthcare, education and housing and develop industries that provide stable sources of income, he said.

Deng Zhengrui, an agricultural expert who participated in agricultural assistance programs for four African countries, said technical guidance offered by Chinese experts has directly helped farmers boost incomes.

In northern Namibia, Deng said Chinese experts were able to help farmers boost harvests of potatoes and other vegetables, which helped to significantly raise their incomes.

“What we brought with us was our technology, our experience and our ideas. We also worked together, lived together and ate together with our local partners to ensure our experience can be fully absorbed,” he added.