Yan'an City in Shaanxi Province, the former capital of the Communist Party of China-led revolutionary base in the 1930s-40s, is now becoming a major production base of pollution-free vegetables.

Statistics show that by the end of 2000, the city had built more than 3,300 sunlight shelters, with the output of vegetables totaling 110,000 tons and the output value topping 150 million yuan (US$18.07 million).

The total area sowed to vegetables in the city is more than 7, 800 hectares, with an annual output value of some 280 million yuan (US$33.73 million).

Each year, the city exports a large amount of fresh vegetables to other cities in Shaanxi and to Hubei, Shanxi and Sichuan provinces.

In the past, the city had no fresh vegetables in nine months of the year.

Yan'an first introduced the technologies to plant vegetables under shelters in 1992.

Currently the per capita income of local vegetable growers has surpassed 4,000 yuan a year.

(People's Daily 08/18/2001)