Xinhua News Agency reported on October 9 that the
UN's 2005 Human Development Report, released on September 7, said
China provided a successful example of poverty reduction.
According to the UN report, since its reform and
opening up began in 1978, China's per capita GDP has increased five
times and the number of absolute poor has reduced by hundreds of
millions.
It said that the number of people in poverty
globally has increased from 1 billion to 1.3 billion in the past
five years, with 750 million starving and more than 1 billion
living without basic needs such as healthy drinking water. In
China, however, in the first four years of its 10th Five-Year
Plan (2001-2005), its population in poverty reduced by 1.5
million each year.
At the Global Conference on Poverty Reduction in
May 2004, Asian Development Bank Vice President Geert van der
Linden said, "Such a large country, with a population of 1.3
billion, has solved the poverty problem of so many people. The
commitment of the country itself is a great contribution to poverty
reduction in the world."
Theodore W. Schultz, American economist and Nobel
Prize winner, said in a 1979 lecture titled The Economics of
Being Poor that "most of the people in the world are poor, so
if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the
economics that really matters. Most of the world's poor people earn
their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of
agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being
poor."
Premier Wen
Jiabao utilized Schultz's theory when talking about the Chinese
economy at a news conference on the Third Session of the 10th
National People's Congress held in March this year. He said that if
we knew agriculture, we would know "The Economics of Being Poor,"
and that without the wellbeing of rural areas, there would not be
wealth for the whole China.
The last batch of UN World Food Program relief
wheat provided was shipped to Shenzhen in southern China on April
7, and Xinhua reported a representative from the program's China
Office saying the Chinese government now had the ability to
eliminate poverty.
Xinhua quoted Liu Jian, director of the State Council's Poverty Alleviation
and Development Office, as saying that since 1978 the number of
poor in China has fallen from 250 million to 26.1 million, 70
percent of the world's total reduction.
Agriculture Minister Du Qinglin told a
conference in September that in the last 25 years, 20 percent of
the increase in international agricultural production was generated
in China, which now leads the world in production of grain, cotton,
edible oil, vegetable, meat, poultry, eggs and aquatic products.
Its annual grain output increased from 300 million to 500 million
tons.
According to Xinhua, the government's special
poverty relief fund increased from 1 billion in 13 billion yuan
since 1980, totaling 115.58 billion yuan. In the 592 poorest
counties, the average net income of farmers increased 23.9 percent
between 2000 and 2004.
The UN Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000,
said that by the year 2015 the number of the world's poor should be
reduced to half that in 1990.
Gu Xiulan told the China Poverty Alleviation and
Development Forum on October 18 that there were still 26.1 million
Chinese people who lacked adequate food, clothing and shelter and
only had an annual per capita income of below 668 yuan.
Gu added that nearly 50 million people are close to
the poverty line, and still need support to ensure adequate food,
clothing and shelter, so there is a long way to go for China in
reducing poverty.
According to the 5th session of the 16th
National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 8,
the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) period will be a critical time
for China to build a wealthy society and the concept of "The
Economics of Being Poor" would be key to this.
Vice Premier Hui
Liangyu told the Global Conference on Poverty Reduction in May
2004 that by the year of 2010, China will have basically solved
poverty problems and that all Chinese people will have adequate
food, clothing and shelter.
Xinhua said the government is discussing a new
cooperation mechanism with the World Food Program, using a donation
of US$20 million to set up a "special fund of China poverty relief
and regional cooperation" in order to support poverty reduction and
regional cooperation in the Asian-Pacific region.
(China.org.cn by Xu Lin October 21, 2005)