More than 600,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers for rail-sea intermodal transportation have been delivered via the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor by Saturday as a train numbered X9596 heading from Qinzhou City of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.
The train was fully loaded with foreign goods such as edible vegetable oil, quartz sand and other materials from Southeast Asia.
The New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, jointly built by provincial-level regions in western China and ASEAN members, now reaches more than 500 ports across over 120 countries and regions, according to sources.
"At present, the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor has linked directly or indirectly 73 cities and 156 stations in 18 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities of China, and the goods transported via it have reached 523 ports in 124 countries and regions around the world," said Huang Jiangnan, head of the Qinzhou Port's east railway station, Guangxi Coastal Railway Company of China Railway Nanning Bureau Group.
Data from China Railway Nanning Bureau Group showed that dozens of new commodities like Nigeria's lithium ore have been included in the corridor transportation.
Currently, the cargo transported along the route covers dozens of major categories including electronic products, complete vehicles and parts, machinery, small household appliances, and food, with commodities totaling 1,157 types.
China's western land-sea trade corridor sees record container throughput
With the beginning of the cotton harvest season, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is anticipating higher yields from advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization.
Xinjiang is the largest production area of high-quality commodity cotton in China. The 2.47-million-hectare cotton growing area in the region has produced more than 5 million tons of cotton for six consecutive years.
The northern and southern parts of the vast autonomous region have different climates, different cotton varieties and also different growing periods. Currently, cotton picking started two weeks ago in northern Xinjiang, while the harvesting has just begun in the southern areas.
In Tumxuk City, located in southern Xinjiang, cotton farmers are using all-in-one harvesters to help them pick cotton, separate the flowers from the stalks and pack them into bundles.
"In the past, we picked the cotton manually. It took us more than a month to pick 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of cotton, and the cost reached 1,000 yuan per mu (about 2,106 U.S. dollars per hectare). Now, we use domestically produced cotton pickers to gather them, which have high efficiency and low cost. It now takes less than a day to harvest my 100 mu of cotton, with a cost less than 200 yuan per mu," said Turaxun Samat, a local farmer.
This year, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the new cotton planting technology of drip irrigation under the mulching film at the appropriate emergence temperature, replacing the old method of irrigating before sowing. The technology can greatly improve the emergence rate while also saving water resources.
In addition, the precision sowing supported by BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and remote sensing monitoring by the agricultural big data platform have also been widely adopted across Xinjiang, contributing to the growth of cotton output.
"This year, a total of 1,057,800 mu (about 70,520 hectares) of cotton have been planted in Tumxuk City, and the unginned cotton yield is estimated at 451.4 kilograms per mu, an average increase of 11.7 kilograms per mu over the previous year," said Chen Yongsen, a member of the leadership of the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The cotton harvesting in Xinjiang is expected to end in early November.
Xinjiang enters cotton harvest season with higher yield expected
