China’s poorest province, Guizhou, stands land-locked in the southwest of the country with a population of 40 million. Roughly 40% of residents belong to ethnic minorities and 28% live below the national poverty line. To help reduce poverty, a World Bank-funded project established 38 new farmer cooperatives that connect them to markets and give them access to more modern agricultural commodity value chains.

The $140.51 million Guizhou Rural Development project was financed by a World Bank loan of $100 million, with additional technical expertise from the Investment Centre of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The project showed farmers in the 11 project counties in the municipalities of Bijie, Zunyi and Tongren new ways to restructure and modernize the agricultural production and processing activities. Read on here.