Traditional Chinese medicine: A pillar industry in Guizhou

By the end of September, the plantation areas for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in Southwest China's Guizhou province reached 6.66 million mu (444,000 hectares), with 909,900 metric tons of output volume and 10.79 billion yuan ($1.61 billion) of output value, according to a TCM promotional conference on Oct 29.

The meeting was held in Danzhai county of Guizhou's Qiandongnan Miao and Dong autonomous prefecture.

Guizhou has supported 25 counties to plant over 100,000 mu of TCM each. It is estimated that Guizhou's TCM industry will provide more than 351,200 stable job positions this year, becoming an important industry to increase incomes in poverty-stricken areas.

Meanwhile, Guizhou's TCM development faces several problems, including a gap between primary processing capacity and industrial development, unformed primary processing business entities, limited standardization of primary processing and a lack of technical service capacity.

Attendees of the promotional meeting concluded that Guizhou should solve the problems and coordinate with provincial, municipal and county-level departments to achieve a primary processing capacity of 600,000 tons by the end of 2021.

By then, standardized primary processing in TCM production areas should generate an added value of over 4 billion yuan, and the total output value should increase 20 percent year-on-year.