Migrants returning home to start businesses

More migrant workers are returning home to start their own businesses, a top agricultural official said on Friday.

“The trend has just started, but it can become popular across the whole country with proper guidance and encouragement measures,” said Han Jun, director of the Office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group. “The number of migrant workers returning to their home villages to start their own businesses in China has kept increasing at an annual rate of about 10 percent for the past five years, and rural areas are becoming hot spots for investment.”

Han Changfu, minister of agriculture, said more than 7 million people, most of them migrant workers, have chosen to go to rural areas to start their own businesses.

With more entrepreneurship in rural areas, e-commerce and tourism have been developing rapidly in the past few years.

Total revenue generated from leisure agriculture and tourism in rural areas reached 570 billion yuan ($85.7 billion) last year, while trade of agricultural products through e-commerce reached 220 billion yuan last year, he said.

Many factors have driven migrant workers back to their villages to start business, including greater demand for better and safer agricultural products, popularity of tourism, improved infrastructure in rural areas and improved delivery and distribution systems due to the development of information technology.

According to a guideline released by the central government in February, local governments will take more measures to encourage business startups in rural areas, including improving the business environment and working out preferential financial and taxation policies.

Per capita disposable income of the rural population in China has increased at an average 8.5 percent every year in the past five years — faster than the income of the urban population — and more than 55 million rural residents had been lifted out of poverty from 2013 to last year, Han Jun said.