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In early September, one afternoon two weeks after returning to Nanning from Laos, Wang Shijie, a member of the Guangxi Poverty Reduction Project Assistance Expert Team, received a picture from local villager Ngawang. In the picture, Awang is standing in the vegetable field he rented, with a newly built bamboo-wood structure greenhouse behind him. He smiles brightly and his eyes are full of confidence that he has never seen before. "At that moment, all the hard work of traveling to foreign fields was worth it, and our work was truly recognized by local farmers." Wang Shijie said.
In Jinhua Village, Saitani County, Vientiane City, Laos, Wang Shijie and a team of experts built a 2,112-square-meter high-standard vegetable greenhouse in two years.
Before the project was launched, local farmers had long followed the traditional open-air planting model without any protective facilities: vegetable fields were easily flooded during the rainy season, and often faced water shortages during the dry season, so vegetable output was always unstable.
Awang is a well-known vegetable grower in Jinhua Village. He had been relying on renting land to make a living. The annual land rent of 250 yuan per mu prevented him from rashly investing in new planting facilities. Until the project team launched a policy of providing incentives and subsidies for building self-built greenhouses, farmers raised their own wood piles, bamboo chips and labor, and the project team provided supporting films, insect-proof nets and a full set of technical guidance. Watching his neighbors build simple greenhouses one after another, and being able to grow neat green leafy vegetables during the rainy season, Awang was finally moved.
Before dawn, he went to the river with a knife to cut bamboo, and worked with his family for six days. A simple greenhouse with Guangxi's technological genes was firmly established in the vegetable field.
During the video connection, Awang showed his white teeth and told Wang Shijie that after the harvest of leafy vegetables was completed, he would try to plant cantaloupe seeds from Guangxi and bring them to Vientiane City to sell them at a good price.
This seed from Guangxi has grown in the bamboo sheds built by the villagers themselves, with the hope of increasing income visible.
In recent years, more and more "seeds" carrying Guangxi's genes have crossed mountains and seas and taken root in ASEAN countries.
In May last year, Liu Jianwen, a senior agronomist at the Autonomous Region Plant Protection Station, took this special seed to the land of Kampong Chhnang Province in Cambodia.
The local loose and barren sandy soil is so hard that it can break a hoe under the scorching sun. Traditional open-air planting cannot withstand heavy rains and repeated attacks of diseases. The villagers guarded a large area of land and worked hard for a year, but could not earn much stable income. Many local children had difficulty eating fresh green leafy vegetables.
The expert team did not directly transport ready-made greenhouse equipment. Instead, they squatted in the sand for a whole week despite the high temperature of more than 40 degrees Celsius, measuring soil fertility, recording the daily precipitation duration, and counting the periods of high pest infestation. Finally, they customized a smart greenhouse plan for this land. Three greenhouses that adapt to the local climate stand firmly on the sand. They are equipped with insect-proof nets and yellow and blue boards to achieve green prevention and control. The organic soil improves the hardened soil, and solar photovoltaic panels solve the problem of frequent local power outages.
The sandy land that used to depend on the weather was awakened by this seed from Guangxi and turned into a vegetable garden with stable yields that can be irrigated by drought and drained by rain.
Subsequently, 13 sessions of field technology training organized by the expert group covered a total of 650 local farmers, and the management and protection technology was completely handed over to local people, allowing this seed to grow its own "roots" in the local area.
In the mountains and plains of Bac Giang Province in Vietnam, this seed has already grown into continuous vineyards. As one of the top ten grape-producing areas in China, Guangxi has 480,000 acres of grape planting base, with an output value of the entire industry chain exceeding 10 billion yuan. This mature cultivation technology adapted to the tropical climate is the most viable seed. At the 2016 China-ASEAN Expo, the Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences signed a cooperation agreement with Bac Giang Agriculture and Forestry University in Vietnam to break the assertion that "commercial grapes cannot be grown in northern Vietnam."
Lu Ronghua, executive director of the China-ASEAN International Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Institute of the Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, went from a master's degree to a doctorate in Vietnam and witnessed the entire process of Guangxi-Vietnam agricultural technology cooperation.
As the person in charge of the Vietnamese project, Ruan Junbai, vice president of Beijiang Agriculture and Forestry University, has been anxious for two years: ever since he planted the first grape seedling, he has to walk around the experimental field three times every day, fearing that the results of previous failed experiments by foreign experts will repeat themselves. It was not until the end of 2018 that heavy bunches of grapes were hung on the pergolas, and the miracle of double-season fruit-bearing in summer and winter was really realized on the land of Beijiang. His dream for two years finally came to fruition.
Now this seed has taken root in more than 30 provinces in north-central Vietnam. In more than 7,500 acres of vineyards, the income from one acre of grapes is more than three times that of local traditional melons. It is affectionately called the "golden fruit to get rich" by farmers. Not only has it been listed as a key poverty alleviation project by the Ministry of Agriculture of Vietnam, it has also been selected as a typical case of ASEAN scientific and technological poverty alleviation by the China Rural Technology Development Center.
There is no vigorous momentum, only hard work on the field ridges day after day. From the sandy greenhouses in Cambodia, to the bamboo chips in the hands of Laotian villagers, to the sweet fruits on the pergolas in Vietnam, this seed from Guangxi has never been an ordinary crop seed. It is the footprints made by agricultural technicians on the field ridges, the soil preparation skills taught step by step, and the sincere help that transcends language and culture. The practical experience of poverty reduction in rural China has produced the most touching story of good-neighborliness and friendship in a land where we drink from the same river.
(Guangxi Daily Guangxi Cloud-Guangxi Daily reporter Modi)
