The province has registered 616.3 billion yuan (US$74.52 billion) in gross domestic product in 2002, up 9.5 percent over the previous year and 1.5 percentage points higher than the national rate, according to the provincial statistics bureau.

The added output value of the agricultural sector was 128.2 billion yuan (US$15.5 billion), up 4.5 percent. The added industrial output value totaled 295.3 billion yuan (US$35.7 billion), up 11.5 percent, and the added output value of the tertiary sector which includes trade and commercial businesses reached 192.8 billion yuan (US$23.31 billion), a rise of 10 percent.

The added output value of state-owned and state share-holding enterprises was 82.9 billion yuan (US$10.02 billion), a rise of 11.8 percent on a yearly basis, while that of collective-owned enterprises topped 32.1 billion yuan (US$3.88 billion), up 13.2 percent, according to the provincial statistics bureau.

Share-holding enterprises realized 44.5 billion yuan (US$5.38 billion) in added output value last year, 15 percent more than the previous year, and foreign-funded enterprises and enterprises with investment from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao registered 9.4 billion yuan (US$1.14 billion) in added output value last year, a year-on-year rise of 9.3 percent.

As a result of industrial readjustment, a large number of key projects, concerning farm produce processing, aluminium production, petro-chemical, electronic information and modern Chinese medicine are under construction or have gone into operation.

The central province of Henan registered a bumper grain harvest for the fifth year running in 2002, with grain output topping 42.09 million tons, 2.2 percent more than the previous year.

The output of oil-bearing seeds went up 15.7 percent to reach 4.19 million tons and the output of meat is expected to top 5.7 million tons, according to figures from the provincial statistics bureau.

Milk output rose by 33.3 percent to 360,000 tons and that of eggs grew by 5 percent to hit 3 million tons.

The cultivated area of quality wheat reached 1.44 million hectares last year, 437,000 hectares more than the previous year, and accounted for 29.8 percent of the province's total area of wheat last year.

Rapid increases were also recorded in the output of vegetables, flowers and fruits, according to the provincial statistics bureau.

(Edited by china.org.cn February 8, 2003)