Hu Yongguo, a farmer in Wushan County, southwest China's Chongqing City, has become much better at raising Mongolian gazelles, thanks to a local distance education program tailored to rural people.

The program helped him earn more than 30,000 yuan (some US$3,614) from raising Mongolian gazelles last year, Hu said.

Usually, Hu raises 300-odd Mongolian gazelles. In the past, his baby gazelles used to die one by one every summer, leaving him puzzled and worried.

Last June, his township logged in to a distance education web, which was part of the county's e-education program to release local farmers from poverty.

The agricultural technique teachers at the township began utilizing the learning website to guide Hu and his folks in their farming. With the aid of the program, Hu managed to find out the cause of the baby gazelles' problems and cured the remaining sick gazelles in time. He continued to use knowledge from the distance-education service and has since had no baby gazelle deaths.

An economically underdeveloped county in the dam area of the mammoth Three Gorges water conservancy project, Wushan started a distance education-based poverty relief program in 2002. The program has not only helped improve the education conditions of the poor mountainous areas in the county, but also promoted industrial restructuring in the rural areas.

Over 3,000 teachers, 70,000 students and farmers at 34 townships in the county have benefited from the education program, according to Chen Shaocong, director of the county's education committee.

Since June 2003, schools with access to the distance education services have printed more than 100,000 copies of downloaded materials on gazelle raising and veterinary care and on the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. They have issued the materials to more than 300,000 farmers in the county. The move helped the farmers gain nearly 500,000 yuan (US$60,240) in economic returns last year, according to statistics provided by the county's agriculture authorities.
 
(Xinhua News Agency March 22, 2004)