Belt and Road business opportunities benefit farmers in western China

Xinhua News Agency, Lanzhou, January 3 (Reporter Tu Guoxi) For farmer Meng Zezhi, New Year's holidays in previous years were part of the winter storage season, but this year's New Year holiday was somewhat different. He and more than 30 other agricultural cooperative representatives gathered for a meeting to prepare early for agricultural contracts worth tens of millions of yuan from Kazakhstan.

Meng Zezhi, now over 50, lives in Wuwei City, Gansu Province, in the Hexi Corridor, which was part of the ancient “Silk Road.” Old Meng has been engaged in agricultural product cultivation and trading for more than 20 years. In the just-ended 2015, he found a target market very different from those of other years.

During that year, he organized more than 200 local specialized agricultural cooperatives into a federation, selling more than 100 tons of locally produced onions, sunflower seeds and Chinese medicinal materials to the two Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan through international freight trains.

Old Meng said that the agricultural products sold to these countries fetch much higher prices than in China; for example, the selling price of one ton of onions was 1,500 yuan higher than in China.

Compared with income, what Old Meng cared about more was the broadening of his horizons. In early December last year, he followed a delegation organized by Gansu Province to visit Kazakhstan for an inspection tour. In Almaty, at the specialty agricultural products distribution center that Gansu Province had already built and put into operation, Old Meng gained a firsthand sense of the industrial complementarity between his hometown and the Central Asian region.

“The onions, potatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables and fruits produced in our hometown are in very high demand in Central Asia; and the cultivation techniques we have mastered, such as for greenhouse vegetables, are also urgently needed by Central Asian countries.” During his time in Central Asia, Old Meng reached two agreements with an agricultural company in Kazakhstan: one was an order to plant 3,000 mu of carrots in Wuwei; the other was for their cooperative to send technicians, with the Kazakh side providing land, to carry out cooperative planting abroad.

Although there are still three or four months to go before agricultural planting, in Old Meng's view, everything needs to be prepared in advance. Regarding the order, they met to discuss inviting experts from Gansu Province's agricultural research institutes to provide follow-up guidance from before sowing. “We must ensure that the products fully meet the standards and requirements of the international market.”

“I feel the channels are already opening up.” Meng Zezhi said that even as farmers, the business opportunities of the “Belt and Road” are not far from them. Selling more specialty agricultural products to countries along the “Belt and Road” and gaining more “export dividends” is his New Year's wish.

Relevant statistics show that, benefiting from the advancement of “Belt and Road” construction, Gansu's agricultural product export market has expanded, and export value has grown noticeably year on year. Among this, from January to October 2015, Gansu Province exported a cumulative 2.01 billion yuan of agricultural products, up 18.9 percent from the same period last year.