World Bank Managing Director Jeffery Goldstein said in Guangxi
Thursday the achievements and experience of poverty reduction in a
World Bank-sponsored development program in southwest China
provides good examples for other countries.
Goldstein led a multinational delegation from March 16-18 to
Du'an County in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to inspect the
progress of a poverty reduction program funded with World Bank
loans.
He said the field trip provided an opportunity for people from
various parts of the world to share experience in the fight against
poverty.
More than 40 representatives from the World Bank, eight
developing and developed countries and the Chinese Government
participated in the trip, which was one of a series of global
activities preceding the Global Conference on Scaling up Poverty
Reduction to be held in Shanghai in May.
The participants visited villages, schools, hospitals, township
enterprises and road construction projects in Du'an County, one of
the 35 poor southwestern counties benefiting from the Southwest
China Poverty Reduction Project.
The World Bank has so far lent US$247.5 million to fund the
project that involved a total investment of US$464 million. Since
the launch of the project in 1995, more than 2.8 million people in
Guangxi, and the provinces of Yunnan
and Guizhou
in southwest China have been benefited.
In Guangxi, the number of people living under the poverty line
was reduced from 8 million in 1993 to 1.5 million in 2000. In Du'
an county, which has been listed among the poorest counties by the
central government, the number of people living under the poverty
line decreased from 265,000 in 1995 to 125,000 in 2001.
Goldstein said success of the project lies not only in enormous
poverty reduction through economic growth, but also in developing a
multi-sectoral approach of promoting integrated progress of
agricultural production, education, public health, labor mobility,
environment protection and community capacity.
Wang Guoliang, deputy director of the State Council Leading
Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, said many of
the approaches and methods in the southwest China poverty reduction
project have found their position in national policy and
strategy.
Alan Piazza, a World Bank senior economist who has overseen the
implementation of the project from the very beginning, said strong
support from the Chinese Government and integration of best
practice with local conditions were key reasons for the success of
the project.
As part of the global learning process and the Shanghai
conference, the World Bank has invited international donors and
recipients to send people to participate in field trips to 70
significant international projects of poverty reduction around the
world. Seven of the model projects picked by the World Bank are in
China.
Besides the trip to southwest China, other trips to the eastern
coast and northwestern part of China will also be organized in the
run-up to the Shanghai conference on global poverty reduction.
Zou Jiayi, deputy director-general of the International
Department of China's Ministry of Finance, said the field trips in
China will provide an opportunity to share China's experience in
poverty reduction. She said the trips will also facilitate the
exchange of views between developing and developed countries and
help them to take concerted efforts to advance global poverty
reduction.
Since China began to carry out large-scale, systematic poverty
reduction in the 1980s, the number of people living under the
poverty line in the country had dropped from 250 million in 1978 to
29 million by the end of 2003. The incidence of poverty in China
also dropped from 30.7 percent to 3.1 percent in the period.
International participants in the field trip to southwest China
said the country had made a significant achievement by lifting more
than 200 million people out of poverty in two decades.
Sun Yu, vice-chairman of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Regional
People's Government, said the regional and local governments in
Guangxi attach priority to eliminating poverty by setting detailed
goals and tasks for the new century. He said the autonomous region
will continue to introduce foreign funds, technology and expertise
into the region's poverty reduction work and develop its
economy.
(Xinhua News Agency March 18, 2004)