Sharing a land border with Myanmar to the south, a small Chinese town of southwest China's Yunnan Province thrives on the sugarcane industry, which also brings benefits to the people of Myanmar in the border area.
Boasting a favorable natural environment, Gengma Dai and Wa Autonomous County, Lincang city of Yunnan, has a long history of planting sugarcane. With 410,000 mu (about 27,333 hectares) of sugarcane fields, the county is a core planting base of sugarcane in China.
As the planting techniques have spread to Myanmar over the past decade, local people in north Myanmar have grown sugarcane. For instance, Mengding Nanhua Sugar Company, which invested to build facilities capable of processing 10,000 tonnes of sugarcane per day, started helping farmers in Myanmar grow sugarcane, along with other cash crops, in 2010. “So far, the people in north Myanmar have grown nearly 110,000 mu of sugarcane,” introduced Zhang Jingwei, deputy mayor of Gengma.
Apart from sugar production, the county makes use of the bagasse to produce various products such as cosmetics, fodder, biodegradable tableware, and paper. According to Zhong Xiaorong, an official at an organic food industrial park of the county, Gengma has successfully developed a whole industrial chain of sugarcane that includes 34 kinds of products, which fall into seven categories.
Zhong added that the whole sugarcane industry has brought each of the sugarcane farmers an extra income of 7,000 yuan (about $1,035.3) per year on average. During the sugarcane crushing season of 2020 to 2021, the comprehensive output value of the county's sugarcane industry amounted to 8.8 billion yuan. “The county aims to achieve an output value of 10 billion yuan in the near future, and see the number double in 2025. Our ultimate goal is the common prosperity of people from both countries in the border area,” Zhong added.