FIGHTING POVERTY WITH STRATEGIES

To achieve the goal of eradicating absolute poverty, China has pledged to prioritize the development of agriculture and rural areas, and to fully advance rural vitalization in its new development stage.

The country is improving the quality, efficiency and competitiveness of agriculture, carrying out rural-development initiatives, and giving rural construction an important position in socialist modernization. Efforts are also being made to deepen rural reforms, through which the country is expected to improve the integrated urban-rural development mechanism.

Meanwhile, it has strived to reduce rural poverty with technological innovations that help boost agricultural production. In the past five years, China has focused on the technical bottleneck of the agricultural industry and promoted more than 50,000 new varieties and technologies to increase the quality and efficiency of this industry in poor areas.

Additionally, continued efforts have also been made to safeguard the employment of the poor, with more than 90 percent of the registered poverty-stricken population having received support in employment or benefited from poverty-relief policies through industrial development in rural areas.

MORE WORK TO BE DONE

Although China is on track to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of 2020, tackling relative poverty will be a long-term task. Therefore, the country needs to take measures to further bolster its achievements in tackling poverty, said Ou Qingping, deputy-director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, at a press conference Wednesday.

Ou also stressed efforts to optimize the monitoring-and-assisting mechanism to prevent people from falling back into poverty.

After winning a complete victory against poverty, the country will allow a transition period during which policies and assistance to help the poor will remain unchanged, with the overall stability of its measures being maintained. Follow-up work in poverty-alleviation relocation will be stressed, while the rural social-security and relief system will be improved, Ou said.

The country is formulating more measures to promote rural vitalization, while consolidating poverty-reduction achievements, Ou added.