For 66-year-old farmer Qi Junqing, selling crops was a new experience.

"I've never dreamed of selling extra crops in my life. Here, poor harvests and starvation were the norm," said Qi, who lives in Dingxi, an agricultural city in west China's Gansu province.

But last year, Qi started marketing his agricultural produce and sold five tons of crops. Even after this year's severe drought, Qi still managed to sell two tons of corn.

The idea of selling crops would have been dismissed as a fantasy some years ago in Dingxi, which used to rank as one of China's poorest regions, and was labeled as "unsuitable for human existence" by visiting UN experts in 1986.

Dingxi, like many other areas in China's barren west, has difficult climate conditions for agricultural production. To grow well in Dingxi, a crop must be tough enough to endure perennial cold, survive meager rainfall and withstand the occasional hailstorm.

Crops like wheat, traditionally cultivated by farmers in Dingxi, apparently failed the tests. Indeed, the city constantly captured media attention over its grinding poverty and persistent famines.

"In some years, the wheat fields didn't produce a thing and we had to raid the mountains for food and firewood," a local villager, Wang Yaonan, said, recalling the hard times.

Yet years of starvation and poverty galvanized the local residents to search for new crops that could acclimatize to local conditions.

In 1995, a deadly drought killed almost all the crops in the fields. But potatoes, or "foreign yams" as residents called them, survived the calamity.

After local officials discovered a drought- and cold-resistant quality in these tiny tubers, a campaign was launched in 1996 to popularize the cultivation of potatoes.