CRI听力:Rural Tourism

Li Xingfang is a farmer in Hongyan village of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Meanwhile, she sometimes receives up to about 300 visitors a day because she is the operator of a Nongjiale, or agri-entertainment. Agri-entertainment is agricultural tourism, where farms offer visitors things to see, to do, and to buy.

"In the business of agri-entertainment, we can earn more than 200,000 yuan a year."

This kind of revenue has been something Li Xingfang could not imagine before she started her agri-entertainment project.
 
Before, she made her living off an orchard which only brought her about 20,000 to 30,000 yuan a year.

Although it was not a great source of income, the orchard is now an important part of her business.

"Nowadays, many tourists come over to pick the fruits. Then I bring them to my orchard. This brings more revenue for me."

Li's village attracts lots of tourists from cities due to its beautiful scenery. Currently, about 80 percent of local households have started their own agri-tourist projects. Zhu Peiming is the head of the village.

"Before local farmers got involved with agri-entertainment, their average income was only 4,000 yuan a year. It mainly came from the fruit they produced. But since 2003, local farmers started to run agri-entertainment projects, while taking care of their orchards. Nowadays the averaging income of local farmers is more than 9,000 yuan."

In China, 70 percent of tourism resources are located in rural areas. According to the latest statistics by the Ministry of Agriculture, the annual revenue of rural tourism around the country is 120 billion yuan.

However, with the rapid development of rural tourism, there are still many problems. The first is that the content of these agri-entertainment projects is all the same. For example, in one small Sichuan village, more than sixty local households are running their own agri-entertainment projects.

one tourist says the agri-entertainment projects in different farms are not special. They are all very much alike. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, there are already 1.5 million agri-entertainment farms around the country, and they mainly provide accommodation, meals and similar entertainment programs.

Liu Xiuchen from Chinese Society of Landscape Architecture talks about the probable result brought on by the similarity of so many agri-entertainment projects.

"The result of too much similarity would be that agri-entertainment would no longer be attractive to tourists. The industry itself would gradually disappear in the end."

Experts say that agri-entertainment should provide tourists more than just a leisure environment and conventional products, as tourists have a wider variety of demands to meet.

For CRI, I am Zhang Wan.