Though food crops yield was less than the previous year, farmers in east China's Anhui Province are still expected to see a 7 percent rise in annual income due to their increasing revenue from non-crop farming industries.
In the first nine months of the year, the farmers' income from farming dropped 9 percent, while the per capita income from industrial and service industries reported a remarkable growth of 36 percent, official statistics show.
The township enterprise reported an industrial added value of 54 billion yuan (6.5 billion US dollars) in the first three quarters of the year, up 5 percent from a year earlier. The township enterprises also reported a drastic 17 percent increase in taxes, indicating the economic performance of those township enterprise has kept improving.
Anhui Province has a rich rural labor source and approximately one-fourth of the farmers work in non-agricultural industries in towns and cities. Their salary has increased by 21 percent compared to last year.
Local agricultural experts believed the change of income structure show that farmers have been more adaptive to changes in markets as well as in weather, which posed a negative effect and caused a slump in food production this year.
(Xinhua 12/19/2000)
