A work meeting on poverty reduction was held recently in southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. The meeting mapped out work priorities in the next phase of poverty reduction work and gave suggestions on employment, housing, and ecology protection in the development process.   

Qi Zhala, the new Chairman of Tibet Autonomous Region, conducted a review of poverty reduction efforts in 2016. He said, Tibet spent a total of 8.5 billion Yuan (1.2 billion U.S. dollars) on poverty relief and made over 130 thousand people get rid of poverty by developing local industries to add jobs last year.    

Wu Yingjie, Party chief of Tibet, made suggestions for poverty reduction work in the next phase. He said there are still about 460,000 impoverished people in Tibet, and most of them are in regions with harsh natural conditions.

Poverty reduction work needs to adapt to the local area, developing unique industries on the basis of local industry advantages and the natural environment, such as farming, commerce, animal husbandry, forestry and tourism, etc. Thus, the locals can shake off poverty via participating in specialty industries without leaving hometowns.     

While developing, it is also important to protect Tibet’s ecology. In addition, Tibet will keep on pushing free education, vocation training programs and developing plateau tourism, Tibetan medicine, clean energy, natural water industry, ethnic handicrafts and specialty product of the region.