Fruit grower Zhao Sining has good reason to be happy. Not only did he enjoy a bumper harvest last year, but thanks to the opening of a new road to his village he can now look forward to selling his produce all year round.

Zhao, who works in Raoping, a county in the eastern part of Guangdong Province, said: "I have to say that the improvements to the road to my village have helped us a lot. Trucks can now drive directly to our orchards, which is something I could hardly imagine before."

He said that in the past he had to travel 10 kilometers on a bicycle to sell his fruit in the town. This unfortunately meant that more often than not, during the harvest season, much of his produce would simply rot away.

Thanks to the hefty investment made by the province, many farmers in Guangdong have benefited from the improvements made to roads in the past few years.

"The condition of the roads plays a decisive role in the economic development of remote rural areas," said Liang Liwen, an official with the Raoping county government.

"Even though the areas have abundant tourist and agricultural resources, economic development has been limited because of the poor condition of the roads," Liang said. "Tourists will not come, and neither will businesspeople.”

"A complete facelift of these areas will not be possible until the roads have been resurfaced," Liang said.

According to Wang Xin, an official with the Guangdong Communications Department, road improvements are a key part of the province's 11th Five-Year Plan, which runs from 2006 to 2010.

"The focus will be on 50 rural counties and those regions which have previously lagged behind in terms of economic development. With better roads, they will be able to start catching up with developed areas in the Pearl River Delta region," he said.

Wang said the five-year plan included spending 47.1 billion yuan (US$6.04 billion) on road construction and related projects in rural areas between 2006 and 2010. More than 75 percent of the money will be spent in underdeveloped areas.

The province plans to repair and resurface some 6,773 kilometers of roads over the five-year period, 2,582 kilometers of which will be national routes.

By 2010 the roads will be able to carry 2.5 billion people and 1.6 billion tons of cargo every year, with those figures expected to rise by 5.2 and 6.9 percent, respectively, year on year.

The province spent 20.7 billion yuan (US$2.65 billion) on resurfacing about 4,600 kilometers of national and provincial roads during its 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-05).

(China Daily March 16, 2007)