China has intensified vocational training of redundant rural laborers in its latest efforts to fight against poverty.

"Though the impoverished people make up 3 percent of China's population, poverty relief still remains an arduous task in a country with 1.3 billion people," said Liu Jian, head of the State Council's Leading Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, at a national conference on poverty reduction and personnel training.

Despite the country's booming economic development over the past two decades, Liu said, 26.1 million rural residents still lived in absolute poverty at the end of 2004. "Most of them live in remote areas where the climate and ecological environment are tough and fragile."

The majority of them have scarce arable land to till, he said. "About 46 percent of the poverty-stricken families in the country's poorest 592 counties have less than 0.06 hectare of cropland per person," Liu said. "It's therefore crucial to train the redundant laborers for non-agricultural jobs."

In central China's Hubei Province alone, about 2.2 million farmers, or 40 percent of all the rural laborers, are working in cities. Their combined annual income constitutes 80 percent of local farmers' total earnings.

At the end of a one-year training session sponsored by the local government, Xiang Heng'e, a female farmer in Hubei, found a job at a joint venture company in east China's Jiangsu Province. As a skilled technician, Xiang earns 1,600 yuan (193 US dollars) a month, three times what her uneducated rural peers generate.

"The training course has lifted my family out of poverty," Xiang said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua on Monday.

The central government has set up training centers in each of the 592 poorest counties with an aim to create more jobs for surplus farmers and help them shake off poverty by 2010, Liu Jian said.

"More than 4.5 million people were trained in a year ending June, 80 percent of whom have found new jobs," Liu said, adding "Training will also improve farmers' quality, narrow the urban-rural income gap and facilitate the coordinated development in cities and the countryside."

According to the Ministry of Commerce, 90 million Chinese residents are living under the internationally recognized poverty line.

By that standard, an average daily income of one US dollar per person, the 90 million Chinese residents, including 75.8 million rural residents, earn an average per-capita annual income of less than 924 yuan (112 US dollars) in terms of purchasing price parity.

Source: Xinhua