First Secretary Guo Ziguo: Focused on poverty alleviation, leading farmers to work
"Just when I was worrying about tuition for my child to attend university, Secretary Guo brought the tuition fee; when I could not afford piglets, Secretary Guo brought piglets; this summer when we suffered from rainstorm and flood disasters and felt utterly helpless, Secretary Guo was the first to come to assess the damage." said Li Yinzhi, a household in extreme poverty in Shima Village, Jiaoyuan Town, Xuan'en County, Enshi Prefecture, Hubei Province. "In any case, whenever we are in the greatest difficulty, Secretary Guo always shows up in time."
In October 2015, the Hubei Provincial Department of Agriculture selected Guo Ziguo, deputy director of the Agricultural Product Quality Inspection Center, to serve as the first secretary of the village Party branch and head of the village-stationed poverty alleviation work team in Shima Village. "Secretary Guo," "Captain Guo," "Old Guo" - although villagers called him by various names, they were all very familiar with him, treated him as a friend, and would tell him about any difficulties and ideas they had.
"For taking off the poverty cap, Secretary Guo deserves the top credit!" Speaking of Guo Ziguo, Yang Hongnian, Party branch secretary and village committee director of Shima Village, was full of gratitude. Shima Village is a key poverty-stricken village in the area, with 96 impoverished households and 312 people out of a total population of 1,225. This year, Shima Village was designated by Xuan'en County as a county-level demonstration village for targeted poverty alleviation, and is expected to achieve village-wide poverty elimination by the end of the year.
Old Guo is actually not old; he just turned 40 this year, but he has rich grassroots experience in agriculture and rural work. Nine years ago, he was rated as an outstanding village-stationed work team member by the Hubei Provincial Party Committee, and in the past 6 years he has been rated as an outstanding Communist Party member three times. For more than a year, Guo Ziguo has treated the village as his home, treated the villagers as family, focused efforts on industrial poverty alleviation, and landed on precise poverty elimination through household-specific measures, solidly doing practical things for Shima Village.
Guo Ziguo believes that all this work - visiting the poor and asking about their hardships, improving infrastructure, and cultivating leading industries - revolves around the goal of increasing income and eliminating poverty. Reflected in industry, that means enabling poor households to use limited resources to produce the greatest economic benefits, using the best steel on the blade's edge.
Walking into Shima Village, lush tea gardens can be seen everywhere along the way - on the flatlands, on the hills, row after row, patch after patch. Almost every plot that can be cultivated has been planted with tea. The whole village has a total of 1,400 mu of tea gardens, but the benefits of tea gardens managed by different households are completely different. Some yield more than 8,000 yuan per mu, while others yield only about 1,000 yuan per mu, and poor households often fall into the latter category.
After a period of investigation and diagnosis, Guo Ziguo analyzed that there were mainly three reasons for this result: first, insufficient labor for picking; second, limited processing capacity for bulk tea; third, product quality not meeting standards. Having found the root of the problem, he led the work team to prescribe the right remedy. That is, make full use of local resources to cultivate modern agricultural industries, stimulate the internal motivation of poor households, and while maximizing the benefits of resources, also strive to avoid damage to the ecological environment, adhering to the path of sustainable development.
The development of the tea industry in Shima Village urgently needed a vital force, and this vital force was a professional agricultural machinery service team. Led by Guo Ziguo, with support from the Hubei Provincial Department of Agriculture's village-stationed work team, the Shima Village Jintudi Tea Agricultural Machinery Service Team was quickly established. It was equipped with 30 sets of tea garden production machinery, including micro-cultivators, tea pickers, pruners, brush cutters, and motorized sprayers, and established an interest-linking management mechanism of "cooperative + service team + tea farmers," allowing poor households to see tangible benefits. The tea garden's production capacity was fully released, and benefits doubled.
Previously, tea farmers in Shima Village generally only picked famous premium tea, and basically did not pick large-leaf tea, mainly because the village had only one small workshop-style tea factory, which could not fully meet the village's tea production needs. But judging from the annual output of the tea gardens, bulk tea accounted for a large proportion. If enterprises did not process it, tea farmers would lose half their income for nothing.
With more tea, sales became a problem again. Guo Ziguo took the upgrading of Shima Village's processing workshop as an important task in the tea industry chain, carried out appropriate expansion to satisfy clean production in the processing workshop, added a special fresh leaf purchasing area, secured 200,000 yuan in funding for the tea processing standardization construction and tea garden mechanization service demonstration project, updated a batch of advanced equipment, and formed market connections with upstream export enterprise Wujiatai Tea Industry Co., Ltd., effectively ensuring that tea farmers' fresh leaves were purchased to the fullest extent possible according to standards.
With output increased and purchasing guaranteed, ultimately obtaining good benefits still required quality as a guarantee in order to achieve high quality and high price. Guo Ziguo gave full play to his professional advantages and adopted a series of measures. The Shima tea processing workshop quickly established a sample retention counter, taking small bag samples with names recorded from tea farmers who sold fresh leaves each day and storing them by group in the sample retention cabinet. Once a problem arose in product spot checks, small sample testing could trace back to the person responsible for selling the fresh leaves.
At the same time, Shima Village secured 710,000 yuan in supporting project funds to launch the "pig-biogas-tea" ecological circular agriculture model, and invested 200,000 yuan in organic tea garden creation and tea garden green prevention and control demonstration projects. Now, in the concentrated contiguous tea gardens of Shima Village's dam area, biogas slurry nozzles can be seen standing among the tea plants, and yellow sticky insect pest boards are hung in the tea gardens, effectively reducing the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in the tea gardens.
In addition, Guo Ziguo also arranged many times for provincial and county tea experts to come to the village to carry out technical training, cultivating tea farmers' prevention concept of "prevention is greater than treatment," and improving the fine management level of the whole village's tea production.
Over the past year, the work team raised a total of 4.67 million yuan in funds and implemented 18 projects, focusing support on upgrading leading industries and infrastructure construction. In 2016, poor households in Shima Village received an average of more than 2,000 yuan per household in industrial development support materials or funds. "Doing work with emotion, thinking about what villagers think, and urgently addressing what villagers urgently need is an important foundation for gaining villagers' understanding and support." Guo Ziguo said that for the extremely poor, the main thing is to let them see hope. But it should also be noted that giving money and materials can only solve immediate difficulties. Increasing industrial poverty alleviation and technical training, and broadening poor households' paths to prosperity through household-specific measures, are the long-term measures that ensure precise poverty elimination.
Guo Ziguo always adhered to the strategy of "rewarding instead of subsidizing." "Do not do the work for the villagers, but support and reward them for doing it. If they do it, support them; if they do not, do not support them. Do not keep idlers. If they participate in pig raising, give them piglets; build the road first, then give subsidies; after walnut seedlings and tea seedlings are planted, then give support." Guo Ziguo said that in this way, the village has a leading industry, poor households have found a path to sustained income growth, and only then can poverty elimination be ensured without returning to poverty.
Reporters He Hongwei, Yue Mingkai