DM Monitoring
HARBIN: Villagers of Wujiazitun like to say their hometown used to be so destitute that “even birds avoided flying here.”
Largely covered with saline-alkali soil, the village in Zhaoyuan County, northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province did not have many crops to harvest in the autumn. When it was windy, the whole village was so shrouded in alkali dust that people could barely open their eyes outside.
In 2003, Cai Yunlou, a businessman from a neighboring village, saw a risky chance to cash in on the barren land. He rented about 24,000 mu (about 1,600 hectares) of local land and connected it with a nearby swamp, planning to transform the area into a wetland.
“To be honest, at the very start, I just wanted to take advantage of the cheap land and make some money,” said Cai. His first idea was to raise fish and reeds. After establishing the Nianyugou Industry group to invest in building canals, cofferdams and other infrastructures, Cai diverted freshwater from the nearby Nenjiang River to ameliorate the soil.
He made it. In three years, the company’s annual revenue reached 5 million yuan (about 773,000 U.S. dollars), and the local environment saw some improvement. But Cai was not satisfied. Sensing that fish were no longer quite profitable, he made a bolder plan to plant paddy rice.
The intention was greeted with loads of cynical comments from the locals. They had failed to do it for generations and seen numerous entrepreneurs with the same attempt “come in Benz and leave on motorbikes,” chuckled Cai while citing those villagers.
“It’s not impossible to turn the saline-alkali land into rice paddies here. The problem is that you need to pour in a large sum but only to see poor harvests,” said He Hongyu, a staffer with Zhaoyuan County’s agricultural bureau.
