Southwest China province to increase planting of medicinal herbs

Southwest China's Guizhou province will add a total of 550,000 mu (about 36,667 hectares) in planting traditional Chinese medicinal (TCM) herbs in 2020, according to a government-led special work team on TCM industry development.

The move is expected to raise the Guizhou's total TCM planting area to 6.55 million mu with an annual output of 1.8 million tonnes, increasing the income of some 346,000 poor people across the province.

As one of the four major TCM production bases in China, Guizhou is rich in medicinal plant resources and home to more than 90 percent of Miao ethnomedicine.

Guizhou has been developing the TCM industry over the past few years and cultivated hundreds of related enterprises and cooperatives with an annual output value exceeding 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion).