Guangdong provincial government has initiated a new program for poverty alleviation which aims to help 700,000 farming households out of poverty in three years.
According to the Guangdong Provincial Poverty Alleviation Work Team, Guangdong's economic aggregate has ranked at number one in China since 1985, however, due to unbalanced development between different regions and the gap in income between city and rural residents, there is still a large population in the rural area of the province who are suffering from poverty. The team says that there are 3,409 poor villages and about 3.16 million people who are living with an annual net income of less than CNY1,500 in Guangdong province.
Wang Yang, secretary of Guangdong Communist Party Commission, said that to implement the poverty alleviation program, responsibilities shall be assigned to specific persons and a targeted therapy method should be applied to use the resources more efficiently.
Under the program, measures will be taken in the next three years to help poor people in the 3,409 less developed villages and households whose members earn less than CNY1,500 in a year get out of poverty and make the incomes of people group more than CNY2,500 and the per capita income of farmers in the province reach CNY9,000 by 2012.
