Peppers add touch of spice to tale of recovery

HEFEI－Dong Heqin had his back in the 1980s as a successful entrepreneur. Then a string of misfortunes befell him, and he became one of the poorest in his village.

Now, the 67-year-old is on his way to becoming a millionaire thanks to a nationwide poverty-relief campaign that aims to eradicate absolute poverty in China by the end of this year.

Dong's life changed in 2015 when he started to grow peppers.

"I had a bad credit rating when I was on the poverty list around 2014, when I was so disheartened that I could hardly hold my head up while walking in the village," says Dong, a farmer from the village of Yanmiao in Funan county, East China's Anhui province.

Life was completely different in the late 1980s when Dong opened a brick factory and made his first bucket of gold. As the richest man of his village back then, Dong was the first to build a two-story house in the area.

However, in 1989, a heavy flood washed away his factory and left him in crippling debts. "People lined up in my doorway to ask for their money back," he recalls.

After that incident, he took over a scrapyard in Beijing and worked there to pay off his debts. Many years later, his business started to boom, yet more challenges soon followed.

Due to environmental concerns, Dong's scrapyard was forced to close down as the capital was gearing up for the 2008 Olympic Games. Shortly after in 2003, his son became mentally ill, and the treatment bills from the well-known hospitals his son went to started to pile up, draining his bank account.

"It felt like the end of the world. I almost lost all hope in life," says Dong.

But a glimmer of hope came when he was included in the local government's poverty-relief program.

"I felt overwhelmed when I received a 6,000 yuan ($850) poverty-relief subsidy. I held it tight on the way back home to make sure I wouldn't lose it," he remembers.

With that amount of money given to him by the local government, he started to grow peppers, the main source of livelihood in the township.

Dong soon became an expert on how to apply fertilizer, irrigation, and how to maintain the greenhouse, and it was the bumper harvest that same year that helped him cast off poverty.

He then poured all of his earnings, totaling 15,000 yuan, into growing the business. His company now has 35 pepper greenhouses, covering an area of 4 hectares and raking in almost 1 million yuan last year.

Dong hires up to 50 rural residents during the busiest picking season in May and September, and those jobs have provided impoverished households with a steady income.

The farmer-turned-entrepreneur is willing to share his secret to success with his fellow villagers who are also interested in the pepper-growing business as this particular plant has helped lift many people in the county out of poverty for years.

Funan was officially removed from the country's list of impoverished counties in late April, according to the provincial government.

By the end of 2019, over 200 hectares of greenhouse vegetables had been planted in the village, mostly peppers, says Wang Meng, Party chief of the Yanmiao village.

"I plan to build a four-story house next year, with an elevator, also a first in the village," says Dong.