MINSK, May 14  -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Belarus has been rich in content, and will generate new momentum for continuously enhanced cooperation in a wide range of fields, including agriculture, a Belarusian expert said.

Aroma Urban, deputy general manager for a subsidiary enterprise of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, made the remark in an interview with Xinhua on Tuesday.

Urban's company, the Scientific and Practical Center for Arable Farming, a state unitary enterprise, was one of the participants of the China-Belarus Local Economic and Trade Cooperation Forum, held here on Monday.

President Xi and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko attended the opening ceremony of the forum, and paid a visit to an exhibition of Belarusian products and scientific research achievements outside the venue, in which Urban's company showed its research findings in seeds, fertilizers and pesticides.

"We're highly encouraged by Xi's speech at the forum, which pointed out the direction for cooperation between our center and our Chinese peers," Urban said.

Xi spoke highly of the rapid development of the China-Belarus economic and trade relationship and the speeding up of the two sides' investment and technological cooperation, noting that local-level cooperation is an important component of the two countries' comprehensive strategic partnership.

Xi urged enterprises from the two countries to make use of their complementary advantages, explore new modes of cooperation and map out new projects, thus developing the local-level economic and trade cooperation into a new growth engine for China-Belarus practical cooperation.

"China has an old saying that 'a relative far off is less helpful than a neighbor close by.' For crop breeding, however, we should follow the opposite principle," Urban said. "Hybridization of crop seeds of the same kind that grow in distant lands could produce new seeds with better quality, higher resistance to pests and natural disasters. There is a bright prospect for Belarus and China to cooperate in this regard."

Urban showed Xinhua the seed bank subordinated to his company, the only seed bank in the entire country. The three low-temperature warehouses stored more than 40,000 plant seeds, some selected from years of farming practices by the people of Belarus and neighboring countries and others selected in the wild by science and research staff.

Urban said the seed bank is cooperating with countries including Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Turkey, and hopes they can enhance cooperation with their Chinese peers in the future.

The seed bank in China's Yunnan Province, for example, is advanced in technology and has preserved a large amount of wild seeds, Urban said. Yunnan is a mountainous province in southwestern China.

Belarus hopes to cooperate and do exchanges with China's seed banks, preserve more seeds with important value and high quality, and thus contribute to the conservation of biological diversity and improvement of crop breeding, Urban said.

"China has long been a big agricultural country, and its agricultural technology has been developing fast. The Belarusian government attaches great importance to ensuring food security and generating revenues by exporting agricultural products," Urban said, noting that currently, practical cooperation in the agricultural field has been relatively weak between the two countries.

"But as the local-level economic and trade cooperation intensifies, agricultural cooperation will also strengthen," Urban said. "The agricultural cooperation between the two countries now stands at a new starting point."

With the China-Belarus comprehensive strategic partnership constantly evolving, agricultural cooperation between the two distant countries will rapidly unfold and bear fruitful results, he added.