Mr. Chair,

I wish to take this opportunity to share with you China’s practice and experiences in harnessing STI for poverty eradication. Upholding a people-centered development approach, the Chinese Government attaches great importance to poverty relief and set the target of eradicating poverty by the end of 2020. Taking poverty eradication as one of the three strategic tasks, the Chinese government has taken lots of measures to achieve this goal. Thanks to the great efforts, at the end of 2020, China successfully lifted all its poor population by the current standard out of poverty. There are many reasons behind the accomplishments, one of which is using STI for poverty relief. There are three important points:

First, establishing an extensive and sophisticated network of technology transfer to promote technology transfer from urban to poor rural areas. The central government has established a nationwide, multi-tiered network of technology transfer in collaboration with regional and local governments, and 1,290 platforms for innovation and entrepreneurship have been set up.

Second, establishing an effective mechanism of special mission STI personnel. Governments at different levels in China have adopted a large number of favorable polices and measures to encourage STI personnel of universities and research institutes to work with poor households as economical partners to promote technology transfer. Through many years of efforts, nearly 300,000 STI professionals have been partnered with poor households, more than 20 billion RMB yuan has been invested in nearly 40,000 projects, and more than 50,000 technologies have been promoted.

Third, establishing an “enterprise plus household” model. The model can effectively connect poor households with the market and better leverage enterprise’s STI expertise to help with application of quality seeds, disease prevention and other technical elements to increase farmers’ outcomes.

China looks forward to more exchange and mutual learning to better harness STI for achieving the SDGs in general and for eradicating poverty and hunger in particular.

Thank you.