Using the green purchase method to help farmers escape the poverty trap in semiarid China

People who live in ecologically fragile environments face both poverty and environmental degradation, which reinforce each other and create a “poverty trap.” Traditional ecological restoration projects focus only on ecological measures, and thus ignore the livelihoods of local residents. Those projects therefore fail to solve the poverty trap. In addition, project subsidies to residents typically end when the projects end, thus forcing residents to return to their old way of life and reversing the gains from the projects. To break this cycle, we performed a study in China’s Yanan City, in Shaanxi Province, to promote a new “green purchase” method for implementing sustainable economic activities that bring residents ongoing earnings without harming the environment. This method involves the construction of terraced fields, establishment of fruit tree orchards, implementation of grazing restrictions, and ecological migration. We found that the method was ecologically effective, as it increased Yanan’s vegetation cover by 0.89% annually since 1999, which is twice the rate for Shaanxi Province.