Affected by the drought this year, three villages (Baimiao Village, Ya’erping Village and Qiaoliao Village) of Fujiayan Township in Wufeng Tujia Autonomous County suffered great losses because of the high rate of small-sized citrus. In addition, the remoteness of the township made their citrus sales even more difficult. Learning this, Ma Xuming, who was making an investigation and survey there on November 25th, instructed through the phone the Municipal Agricultural Bureau to help the planters. In the afternoon, the bureau immediately organized Xingxiang Agricultural Products Professional Cooperatives Union, Xiaoxihong Citrus Cooperatives and other 6 leading citrus enterprises to make on-site docking services, and quickly solved the problem (It had been previously reported in the second edition of this paper on November 30th). Currently, Fujiayan Township’s citrus sales exceed 100 tons per day. For this, the bureau has been praised by the local planters.

 

　　Xiong Changquan, the Party Secretary and Director of the Municipal Bureau of Agriculture, said that the next step of the bureau is to draw inferences from the case and make further efforts to help farmers increase yields and incomes. Meanwhile, the channels of information exchange are to be timely smoothed. To be specific, with the help of "1+9" Agricultural Comprehensive Information Platform of the bureau, the telephone numbers of professional citrus cooperatives and waxing factories of the entire city and citrus production in rural and remote villages will be timely released on the Agricultural and Rural Supply and Demand Information Release System to promote the citrus production and marketing docking; and a free farmer-benefiting version of the Three Gorges Mobile Newspaper will be launched for the citrus farmers in the 1000 remote mountainous areas of the city. And the bureau will actively promote the export of citrus by supporting the establishment of a private export company based on such cooperatives as Xiaoxihong, Tulaohan, Xing Xiang, Yanghong and Juyuan, by strengthening the contacts with boundary trade ports like Manchuria, Khorgos, and Ruili, and by creating favorable conditions to expand citrus exports. Besides, the bureau will try to make those remote areas better organized, helping the farmers to establish contacts with enterprises and cooperatives. And based on long-term development, the bureau will help the local people to foster professional cooperatives so that there will be one citrus cooperative in every village there. As another way out, a local intensive processing of the fresh citrus will ease the marketing pressure. (Reporter: Li Pengfei; correspondent: Fang Suzhen)