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Harnessing flower power to beat poverty
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Hong Kong-born Annie Leung still remembers her first visit in 2017 to the remote mountains in southwest China’s Guizhou Province, with fresh memories of the wild leeks all over the rolling hills.
“At that moment, I felt like I was in a fairy tale,” Leung recalled.
Leung’s first trip was not for leisure, but to seek business opportunities to aid the poverty-stricken villages of Hezhang County on Wumeng Mountain, where finding work in big cities has long been the only way out of poverty.
With a high altitude and a favorable climate, planting flowers soon became the primary focus for the 28-year-old general manager of the Guangzhou-based Ganghua Agricultural Technology Co Ltd.
Leung and a team of professionals traveled around a dozen villages and towns in Hezhang, looking for suitable land.
She began her plan as the company signed an investment agreement with the county in May 2018 to build a pastoral complex and a flower breeding base, aiming to raise the income of poor local households.
However, it was no easy task for the metropolitan girl raised by a nanny who spent her college years in the United States, where she met many young people from the Chinese mainland and decided to pursue a career back in China.
“At that time, I seldom did chores, let alone work in the fields,” she said.
Her journey was not easy, even with Leung and her team fully prepared. Language and dietary differences discomforted Leung’s employees, most of whom were Cantonese.
“There even used to be doubts about the choice,” she said. “But they disappeared when we saw local officials work day and night to help people in poverty.”
Leung worked hard to persuade local farmers to grow flowers rather than traditional crops like potatoes and corn. She plans to start a demonstration center to inspire more young people from the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area to join the fight against poverty.
“Younger generations of Hong Kong should take on the responsibility of helping in the fight against rural poverty,” she said.
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