The business opportunity of "Belt and Road Initiative" benefits farmers in western China

Xinhua News Agency, Lanzhou, January 3 (Reporter Tu Guoxi) for farmer Meng Zezhi, New Year's Day's holiday in previous years was part of winter collection, but this year's New Year's Day holiday is somewhat different. He and more than 30 other representatives of agricultural cooperatives gathered for a meeting to prepare ahead of time for agricultural contracts worth tens of millions of yuan from Kazakhstan.

Meng Zezhi, over 50, lives in Wuwei City, Gansu Province, in the Hexi Corridor, which is part of the ancient "Silk Road." Lao Meng has been engaged in the cultivation and trafficking of agricultural products for more than 20 years. In 2015, he found a target market that was very different from that of other years.

During the year, he organized more than 200 local agricultural cooperatives to form a federation to sell more than 100 tons of locally produced onions, sunflower seeds and Chinese herbal medicines to two Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, through international freight trains.

Lao Meng said that the prices of agricultural products sold to these countries are much higher than those at home. For example, the price of a meal of onions is 1500 yuan higher than that at home.

Compared with income, what makes Lao Meng care more is the broadening of his horizons. In early December last year, he went to Kazakhstan with a delegation organized by Gansu Province. In Almaty, in the distribution center of characteristic agricultural products that has been built and put into operation in Gansu Province, Lao Meng has a personal feeling about the industrial complementarity between his hometown and Central Asia.

"vegetables and fruits such as onions, potatoes and cucumbers produced in our hometown are in great demand in Central Asia, and the greenhouse vegetables and other planting techniques we master are also urgently needed by Central Asian countries." During his stay in Central Asia, Lao Meng and Kazakh agricultural companies reached two agreements: one was an order to plant 3000 mu of carrots in Wuwei, and the other was for their cooperative to send technicians and Kazakhstan to provide land for cooperative cultivation abroad.

Although there are still three or four months to go before the cultivation of agricultural products, in Lao Meng's view, everything needs to be prepared in advance. With regard to the order, they held a meeting to invite experts from agricultural research institutions in Gansu Province to follow up and guide them before they were planted. We should ensure that the products are fully in line with the standards and requirements of the international market.

"I feel like the channel is already open." Meng Zezhi said that even as farmers, the business opportunities of "Belt and Road Initiative" are not far away from them. It is his New year's resolution to sell more agricultural special products to countries along the "Belt and Road Initiative" route and get more "export dividends."

Relevant statistics show that thanks to the promotion of the construction of "Belt and Road Initiative", the export market of agricultural products in Gansu has expanded, and the export quota has increased significantly compared with the same period last year. From January to October 2015, Gansu Province exported a total of 2.01 billion yuan of agricultural products, an increase of 18.9 percent over the same period last year.