Poverty Alleviation: Wormwood industry creates jobs for villagers in central China

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Wormwood is widely-used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat various diseases. And it's becoming popular among Chinese for maintaining good health. Now, a wormwood product company in a village in Central China is hiring poor villagers, helping to alleviate poverty in the region. CGTN reporter Li Jianhua visited the company and filed this report.

The right time to harvest wormwood plants in Central China's Henan Province. Harvested three times a year, this plant is helping maintain the local employment rate. Wormwood is well-known in traditional Chinese medicine for helping to preserve one's health. After the harvest, the plants end up here for medicinal use. And most who work HERE are poverty-stricken villagers.

XU KE VICE PRESIDENT OF ADMINISTRATION, JIU TOU XIAN AI "We provide jobs for the villagers. They can plant wormwood in the field or work in the company. We teach them how to plant and harvest wormwood. And we sign contracts with the local villagers who suffer from poverty. We provide them with free wormwood seeds, then the company will buy the harvest from them."

Some jobs may require a bit more skills, like wormwood stick making. It involves wrapping the ground wormwood plants and making them into sticks. The sticks can be burned over certain parts of the body and are believed to be capable of curing some diseases.

SHEN GAILIAN VILLAGER "My eldest child is in college, and my youngest one is in high school. It's not easy to support them. I didn't have a job before. For this job, it was easy to get the hang of it, and it could help support my family."

Currently, over 10-thousand people in this county alone live below China's national poverty line. Many challenges still lie ahead for them.

LI QINGYONG MAYOR, FUDAO TOWNSHIP "The challenges we've met mostly come down to the poor villagers themselves, for instance, some of them are unable to work, and some don't have high working skills. In addition, different villages have different conditions in terms of infrastructure and facilities."

And other local officials say they are worried some villagers may fall into poverty again after being lifted out of it. Sustainability may be the biggest challenge they face. LJH, CGTN, TANGYIN, HENAN PROVINCE.