Editor's Notes: Liu Jiakun, a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), submitted a motion regarding modern agriculture to address the issues surrounding agriculture, farmers and rural areas during the "Two Sessions" this year, aimed at alleviating rural poverty as China's 13th Five-Year Plan has required.

Liu Jiakun, a deputy from east China's Shandong Province, walks along the bare areas at dusk on a snowy winter day, where a tangle of withered honeysuckle vines spread their branches near the entrance to Jiujianpeng Village. [chinagate.cn by Zheng Liang]

According to Liu, farmers,who make up more than half of the country's population, are the original entrepreneurs producing the most agricultural products in China. Currently, they have found themselves tightly encircled as they face major environmental challenges and a shortage of farming resources.

Liu initiated a bold motion to promote modern agriculture featuring organic farming in a more efficient and ecological manner, which would cause a profound influence on ecological integrity and have a large harvest possibility for truly sustainable farming. Liu thinks that the more efficient arrangements farming adopts, the more benefits farmers will get.

In fact, Liu has been a major contributor to rural poverty in the mountainous area of Jiujianpeng Village, a traditional village in east China's Shandong Province. In 1984, Liu led his villagers to build an access road in the mountains that would reach every home. Since then, he immersed himself in learning how to plant, grow and care for honeysuckle plants within a defined local area noted as the biggest Chinese honeysuckle base.

Liu introduced the fact that in traditional Chinese medicine, honeysuckle flowers are among the important herbs for clearing away heat and relieving toxicity. Liu's explorations on honeysuckle have given locals huge wealth as he popularized his newly sprung high-tech industries centered on honeysuckle species in 2003 and 2015. Now, 90 percent of the locals began to grow the new species of honeysuckle with their annual income increasing from several hundred yuan to 30,000 or 40,000 yuan (US $4,600 to US $6,100).

As far as Liu was concerned, growing a new species of honeysuckle was one of the ways to lift local rural people out of poverty. To promote modern agriculture is a basic way to improve the people's well-being and to achieve the 2020 poverty relief target.

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