Outline for Development-oriented Poverty Reduction in China’s Rural Areas (2011-2020).

The Outline for Development-oriented Poverty Reduction in China’s Rural Areas (2011-2020) is a guiding document of national poverty alleviation and development work for the next decade. It has been formulated to further accelerate the development of poor areas, promote common prosperity, and achieve by 2020 the goal of building a moderately prosperous society. The Outline is a cross-sectoral document. The main objectives are: adequate food and clothing, compulsory education, basic medical care and housing will be available to all poor population; the growth rate of per capita net income of farmers in poor areas will be higher than the national average level; the indicators of basic public services will be close to the national average level; and the tendency of development gap enlargement will be reversed. The Outline is divided into five parts, nine chapters and forty-nine articles. The first part is the foreword; the second part contains two chapters, including general requirements and targets and tasks; the third part includes one chapter which specifies target group and scope; the fourth part contains four chapters covering specific, industrial and social poverty reduction programs as well as international cooperation; the fifth part involves two chapters including policy guarantee and organizational leadership.
According to the Outline, by 2010, the rural minimum living security system had been fully established and the survival, food and clothing problems of rural residents had been basically solved in China. On the basis of this judgment, the Outline puts forward the characteristics of poverty alleviation and development work in the future: "poverty alleviation and development in China has been transferred from the stage of focusing on solving food and clothing problems to the new stage of consolidating the results of addressing food and clothing problems, accelerating poverty reduction, improving the ecological environment, enhancing the development capacity and narrowing the development gap". Two of the main tasks are: a.basic farmland and water conservancy, by 2015, basic farmland and irrigation and water conservancy facilities shall be greatly improved in the poverty-stricken areas, and by 2020, agricultural infrastructure significantly improved; b. forestry and ecology, the forest coverage rate in poor areas shall increase 3.5 percentage than the end of 2010. The Outline proposes the measures for ecological construction, including: continue the key ecological restoration projects in the fields of returning farmland to forest, returning grazing land to grassland, soil and water conservation, natural forest protection, protection forest system construction, and desertification control; establish ecological compensation mechanism with focus on poverty-stricken areas and strengthening ecological compensation in key ecological function areas; strengthen biodiversity conservation, grassland protection and construction, renewable energy development and application in poor rural areas, etc.
The Outline recognizes that poverty alleviation is still long term historic task. A guiding principle was developed: the government will adhere to the development-oriented poverty alleviation, implement the effective convergence of poverty alleviation and development and the rural minimum living security system, and gradually improve the social security system. A target group was identified, which falls into four levels, namely, the poverty reduction recipients, the contiguous destitute areas, key counties and poverty-stricken villages. The poverty reduction recipients are rural poor below the poverty line, but have the ability to work. It proposes to raise the standard of poverty alleviation, increase investment, take contiguous poor areas as the main battlefield and focus on providing adequate food and clothing for the poor and lifting them out of poverty as soon as possible. As one of the main tasks, the Outline proposes that rural social protection and service shall be improved significantly by 2020. As for policy guarantee, the Outline requires relevant parties to improve strategies and policy systems that are conducive to poor areas and their needy residents. Meanwhile, it conducts policy design in eight aspects, namely fiscal support, favorable investment policies, financial service, industrial support, land use, ecological preservation, guarantee of talents, and giving priority to supporting key groups such as minorities, women and disables. The Outline proposes to establish and improve new technology service system in line with the actual situation of poor areas, accelerate the construction of scientific and technological poverty alleviation demonstration villages and households and promote good practices and good crop seed varieties. The Outline requires promoting rural employment by supporting and providing training to the youth, disables and new labours in poor rural families.
The Outline has further included farmer cooperatives as an institutional innovation to boost incomes and the self-development capacity of poorer farmers and farming communities. This will require the introduction of new measures and funding mechanisms. This Outline recommends that these measures include: (i) broad social sector involvement in strengthening cooperative management and governance; (ii) provision of improved market information and marketing skills, including through vocational education and training; and (iii) establishment of a government rural poverty reduction fund to provide subsidized poverty loans to selected and monitored poor area farmer cooperatives.
The Outline addresses enhanced disaster prevention and mitigation capacity. It proposes: to improve natural disaster emergency relief system and affected people living assistance policies; to improve comprehensively the rural road service level and disaster prevention and resilience capacity; and to increase efforts on mudslides, landslides and other geological disaster prevention and control, with emphasis on monitoring and early warning disaster-prone region.
As for organization guarantee, first, the Outline proposes the management system “whereby the central government plans the project as a whole, provinces take overall responsibility and counties shoulder responsibility of implementation” and the working mechanism of “focusing on contiguous poor areas and implementing projects in specific impoverished villages and poor households”. Second, it requires to further improving evaluation incentive mechanisms for officials as well as departments and key counties, and organizational departments at all levels should actively coordinate work in this regard. Third, it proposes to accelerate law making processes in order to provide a legal basis for poverty reduction.