China News Service, Guangzhou, November 7th: Guangdong promotes the integrated and innovative development of forestry with “Six Trees” to increase the income of forest farmers
Author Cheng Jingwei Linyin
After the frost this year, Camellia oleifera fruits were hanging on the branches at the Xinyi Camellia Camellia Planting Base in Maoming, Guangdong, and forest farmers were busy picking the fruits, which became a beautiful scenery during the autumn harvest season.
According to the Guangdong Provincial Forestry Bureau on the 7th, as of now, the Camellia oleifera planting area in Maoming City is 320,600 acres, and the annual output of Camellia oleifera fruit exceeds 40,000 tons. Starting from late October this year, various regions in Maoming have entered the peak season for picking camellia oleifera fruits.
Forest farmers enjoy a bumper harvest of Camellia oleifera fruits.Photo courtesy of Guangdong Provincial Forestry Bureau
As an active development area for camellia oleifera in Guangdong, Maoming has strengthened its support for scientific and technological innovation in recent years, selected excellent varieties suitable for local planting, and established an improved seed resource nursery and breeding base to achieve improved and standardized production of camellia oleifera seedlings.
In addition, the Maoming Agricultural Reclamation Bureau and the scientific research team have cooperated to build two contiguous standardized high-yield cultivation demonstration areas of Camellia oleifera with an area of more than 10,000 acres, and four camellia oleifera fruit shelling and drying processing production lines, which have effectively improved the comprehensive competitiveness of Maoming Camellia oleifera industry.
In recent years, Maoming has relied on the entire industry chain of resource endowments to build a “six-tree” green forest fruit forest medicine industry system of lychee, longan, orange red, agarwood, Sanhua plum, and camellia oleifera. The annual output value exceeds 37 billion yuan, accounting for 10% of Maoming’s economic forestry industry. The output value is over 90%. Focusing on the “Six Trees” industry, Maoming vigorously develops new business formats such as leisure tourism and forest tourism, integrates forestry, enterprise, cultural tourism and other resources, and promotes the integrated development of the “Six Trees” primary, secondary and tertiary industries.
Farmers pick agarwood leaves.Photo courtesy of Guangdong Provincial Forestry Bureau
Since the beginning of this year, in order to give full play to the comprehensive benefits of Guangdong’s ecological construction and promote the development of characteristic forestry industries, Guangdong has successively issued the “Guangdong Province Three-Year Action Plan to Accelerate the Development of Camellia Camellia Industry (2023-2025)” and “Guangdong Province to Accelerate the Innovative Development of Guangdong’s Bamboo Industry “Key Tasks Division of Labor Plan” and other documents, implement the forest identification and brand promotion of the “Yuelin Camellia Oil” public brand product, promote the establishment of an innovative cooperation platform for the bamboo industry in Guangdong Province, and leverage school-local cooperation to strengthen cooperation with Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University, South China Agricultural University, etc. Exchanges between colleges and universities cultivate and strengthen new forestry business entities, promote the establishment of a stable interest linkage mechanism between business entities and farmers, and promote the integrated and innovative development of primary, secondary and tertiary forestry industries.
Maoming Huazhou Juhong Industrial Base.Photo courtesy of Guangdong Provincial Forestry Bureau
Up to now, Guangdong Province has a forest area of 143 million acres, with a forest coverage rate of 53.03%. It currently has 1 national forestry industry demonstration park (Deqing), 20 Guangdong Province forestry specialty industry development bases, 5 national forest health bases, and 5 national forest health care bases. There are 18 under-forest economic demonstration bases; 35 national leading forestry enterprises; 286,600 acres of new camellia production and 98,600 acres of low-rise buildings have been completed.
According to the relevant person in charge of the Guangdong Provincial Forestry Bureau, Guangdong will continue to deepen the reform of the collective forest rights system and actively guide local and grassroots production units and enterprises to widely plant camellia oleifera, bamboo and other “cash cows” that have both high ecological and economic benefits. “Promote the upstream and downstream, online and offline integrated development of underforest planting and breeding economic industries such as Chinese medicinal materials and tea, implement the pilot demonstration work plan of the ecological product value realization mechanism in Guangdong Province, and promote the construction of national and provincial underforest economic demonstration bases, Create Guangdong forest health care brand and “Guangdong Forest +” and other forest product brands. (over)
