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Big bucks, bad backs await cotton crew

By Ma Lie (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-28 07:15

XI'AN: Liang Fengling from Longxian county, Shaanxi province, is looking forward to making some good money over the next few months, as a cotton picker in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

"This will be my second time. Last year, I earned 4,000 yuan ($580) for a month's work," the 34-year-old mother told China Daily shortly before boarding a train at Xi'an railway station on Wednesday.

"Picking cotton is really hard work and I have to leave my children behind, but I can make a lot of money doing it."

As farmers, her family earns a combined salary of just 10,000 yuan a year, she said.

This year, pickers will earn 1.2 yuan for every kilogram of cotton they bag, up 20 percent on last year.

Liang was among a group of 104 workers leaving for Xinjiang yesterday. Tens of thousands more are set to follow.

Xu Min, who works at Xi'an railway station, said: "More than 1,500 farmers have left to work as cotton pickers in Xinjiang over the past week.

"By the end of the season about 300,000 people will leave from this station."

The Lanzhou railway bureau, which manages all the railways and stations in Gansu, Xinjiang, Qinghai and Ningxia, told the Xinhua News Agency that between Sunday and Sept 20, about 110,000 people from Gansu, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Henan will go to work as cotton pickers.

The Xinjiang government said earlier that it might need as many as 1 million migrant workers over the course of the season.

More than 1.3 million hectares of cotton were planted in the region this year, and these are expected to yield about 2.5 million tons, Ma Ying, director of the rural economy department of the Xinjiang regional development and reform committee, said.

As China's largest cotton producer, the region's annual output has risen from 1.35 million tons in 1999 to more than 2.7 million tons last year, he said.

"Last year, we contributed almost 40 percent of the country's total cotton output," he said.

The reason why so many people are needed is because machines are too expensive and hand-picking leads to better quality, Ma said.

The cotton-picking season usually runs from August to November, he said.

With so much cotton to prick, it has become standard practice for farmers to recruit workers from neighboring provinces and regions.

Zhang Cunliang, a Xinjiang farmer with 4 hectares of cotton, said: "Employing lots of migrant workers means we can get our harvest into the warehouse before the bolls fall and ruin."