Gansu sees a healthy return from herb farms

LANZHOU — Northwest China’s Gansu province has made herbal medicine development a pillar industry to stimulate the local economy.

The provincial government has set the goal of realizing a 66 billion yuan ($10 billion) output value for the whole industrial chain of Chinese herbal medicines by 2023, according to a promotional event held over the weekend.

As a traditional growing area of Chinese herbal medicines, such as Angelica sinensis and Codonopsis pilosula, Gansu has 310,000 hectares of herbal plantation area with the output in 2019 amounting to 1.3 million metric tons and the output value chalking up 44 billion yuan.

The city of Dingxi in Gansu is one of the driest and least-developed areas of western China and was declared “uninhabitable” for humans by visiting UN experts in the 1980s. People living here had long been mired in poverty until last year, when the city was among the last batch of impoverished areas in Gansu to be removed from the poverty list. Drought-resistant farming, such as herbal medicine and potato cultivation, has contributed greatly to the local economy.

Minxian county of Dingxi is known as the “home of Angelica sinensis in China”, where 50 percent of its cultivated land is used to grow the herbal medicine, yielding profits which account for 60 percent of the net income of the farmers there.

Looking to the future, the provincial government has planned to cultivate the development of the industrial chain for herbal medicines. It hopes to nurture 76 leading enterprises in the sector by 2023.