Mr. President, Mr. Chairman, Dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It's a pleasure for me to meet all the friends present at this session of the Governing Council and to discuss the challenges facing us in resolving the problem of global poverty. On behalf of the Chinese Government, I'd like to express our appreciation to IFAD for its enduring efforts in poverty reduction.

Achieving common prosperity through common development is a perpetual subject of today's world. For a long period of time, the international community will still have to make relentless efforts in seeking more consistent strategy for global poverty reduction, more effective assistance mechanism for development, and broader strategic partnership for antipoverty intervention.

My Colleagues!

Innovation is the soul of and power for development. We notice with high spirit that IFAD puts, as it has always been, the innovation as a significant part of institutional capacity building for increasing the efficiency of development. In recent years, through reforming and adjusting its development strategies and adopting new policy measures. IFAD has been integrating step by step its rationale of poverty reduction into the realities of the developing countries, thus increasing the efficiency of its program implementation and fund utilization and contributing more positively to the global poverty reduction.

In this connection, we hope that IFAD would continue to play an even better role in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, accelerate the development of innovation antipoverty systems, harmonize the development strategies, promote the information sharing through exchange of experiences among recipient countries, and strengthen the cooperative partnership with other international agencies. At the same time, IFAD should give more attention to improving its operating mechanism, increasing its assistance effectiveness through implementing reforms and capacity building.

In the past two decades, China has been carrying on fruitful cooperation with IFAD, from which hundreds of thousand of poor farmers have benefited, and through which the advanced poverty reduction concepts and methods of IFAD have been implemented. IFAD's development strategy as reflected in the Country Strategic Opportunities Paper for China is fully in line with China's specific country circumstances, which will undoubtedly tone in with and push forward the implementation of China's antipoverty strategy.

My colleagues!

China has made significant achievements in poverty reduction. Particularly since the 1980's, the Chinese government has explored a path for “overall development through poverty reduction by relying on self-dependence with participation of all walks of life while the government plays the dominant role” . This is a path on which the government supports and guides the people in poverty-stricken areas to enhance their capabilities of self-development so as to fundamentally resolve the basic food and clothing problem through economic restructuring, tapping local resources and developing commercial products, based on market mechanism.

However, these achievements can only be viewed as initial results, because China is confronted with new challenges in fighting against absolute rural poverty mostly in the central and western China where the ecological environments are extremely harsh and the pace of poverty reduction is slowing down. Therefore, China has no other alternatives but to make long-term, arduous and relentless efforts to eliminate its poverty, and China still needs assistance and support from the international community.

My Colleagues!

The antipoverty battles in China and other nations are reciprocal. China shall, as it has always been, strengthen its cooperation with IFAD in its overall efforts to reduce global poverty. And therefore, on behalf of the Chinese government, I would like to take this opportunity to announce officially that China will pledge sixteen million US dollars (USD 16,000,000) for the 7th replenishment of IFAD resources, an increase of 52.4% over the 6th replenishment.

Let's work together for a poverty-free and harmonized world with common prosperity and lasting peace.

I wish this session of the Governing Council a great success!

Thank you.