Thanks to the efforts of employment transfer, the villagers of Yarmali can finally live a wealthy life, and the aroma of fruits is always floating in the village in summer.

Yarmali in Auitoglak township, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was once a village surrounded by the Taklamakan Desert. Due to the encroachment of the sand, plants barely survived there and the people were living in poverty.

Because of the harsh ecological conditions, it was difficult for the people living at Yarmali village to shake off poverty through agriculture. Meanwhile, the development of the village was further hindered by the huge rural labor surplus.

As a result, a vicious circle was formed in the village, with deteriorating ecological environment, shrinking farm production, enlarging labor surplus, and growing poverty closely knitted with each other.

Therefore, poverty reduction became an urgent need that must be addressed by the stationing officials and village leaders.

The village was facing two prominent problems: how it could combine labor surplus with agricultural development and how it could protect local ecology without impeding agricultural development and causing a decline in population.

After repeated investigations and discussions, village cadres decided to think differently and resorted to employment transfer as a way to facilitate poverty alleviation.

Employment transfer is not job hopping. A well-established industrial chain of modern agriculture, as well as the introduction of favorable policies for relevant manufacturing enterprises is a prerequisite for creating new jobs.

To promote employment transfer and assist relevant work, poverty relief cadres searched hard for jobs with low recruiting standards that were also close to the laborers, organized pre-job training and mandarin courses. 

Besides, officials were sent to the working sites with the laborers in order to provide better management, and improve communication, summaries and feedback.

Thanks to the employment transfer, 23-year-old Awahan Ainiwar now works as a manager assistant at a village-run factory that owns 154 weaving machines. However, farming and cooking were all she could do three years ago as a woman who finished only junior high school.

Awahan is not the only one that has benefited from employment transfer. Some of the villagers in Yarmali have become pancake makers, producing hundreds of pancakes a day; some work on a ranch, picking and cleaning alfalfa, and selling them to supermarkets in the city; and some work for a rose production factory.

Last year, 295 villagers were employed and lifted out of poverty. “The new jobs have become a major source of income for many households,” said Kou Xianmin, first secretary, or poverty-reduction official of the village’s Party branch.

The sound development is also improving the ecology of the village. In Yarmali, dayun, an herbal medicinal weed that grows with rose willows and helps fixing sands, has become an important source of income for the villagers after preliminary processing and is lending a big hand to desert control. 

The plant is making desert control profitable, and more and more people are willing to join the combat against desertification under such appeal. As a result, the Yarmali village has turned into a sea of green.