Given the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a timely study on the impacts of and policy response to the pandemic on rural poverty in China is critically important because China has aimed to completely eradicate extreme poverty by the end of 2020.  This paper uses data from the latest round of a nationally representative household panel survey to examine the impacts of the pandemic on rural poverty in China.  Our data show that 11.9% of sample households were ever officially registered as poor households between 2013 and 2019, and this poverty incidence fell to 2.7% by the end of 2019.  In the middle February of 2020, 23% of the households who have graduated from poverty since 2013 perceived that they would fall back into poverty due to the COVID-19.  Among those never poor households, 7.1% perceived that they would possibly fall into poverty due to the pandemic.  Results from both descriptive and multivariate analyses consistently show the interruptions that the pandemic caused in off-farm employment is an important channel that led households to perceive of falling back into or falling into poverty.  We also find households in the bottom four quintiles when ranked in terms of household income per capita are much more likely to perceive themselves of falling back into or falling into poverty during this pandemic than those in the richest quintile.  Meanwhile, our results show that the education and age of household heads, as well as being from Hubei Province matter in explaining household perception about falling back into or falling into poverty in some cases but not all.  The paper concludes with a set of policy responses that China has taken to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on poverty alleviation. 

In Arabidopsis, systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is established beyond the initial infection by a pathogen or is directly induced by treatment with salicylic acid (SA) or its functional analogs, 2,6-dichloroisonicotinic acid (INA) and benzothiadiazole (BTH).  NPR1 protein is considered the master regulator of SAR in both SA signal sensing and transduction.  In wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare), both pathogen infection and BTH treatment can induce broad-spectrum resistance to various diseases, including powdery mildew, leaf rust, Fusarium head blight, etc.  However, three different types of SAR-like responses including acquired resistance (AR), systemic immunity (SI), and BTH-induced resistance (BIR) seem to be achieved by activating different gene pathways.  Recent research on wheat and barley NPR1 homologs in AR and SI has provided the initial clue for understanding the mechanism of SAR in these two plant species.  In this review, the specific features of AR, SI, and BIR in wheat and barley were summarized and compared with that of SAR in model plants of Arabidopsis and rice.  Research updates on downstream genes of SAR, including pathogenesis-related (PR) and BTH-induced genes, were highlighted.

 

Excessive nitrogen (N) fertilization of high value horticultural crops is a common problem that not only increases the cost to farmers, but also negatively affects crop growth and the environment.  A three-year field experiment was conducted in an intensive kiwifruit orchard in Shaanxi Province, China to compare the effects of reduced N fertilization applied as urea (U), and controlled release urea (CRU) on the N nutrition of kiwi vines, fruit yield and quality, and nitrate-N accumulation in the soil profile.  The three treatments included a conventional N application rate (CF-U, 900 kg N ha^–1 yr^–1 as urea), two reduced N fertilization treatments where the amount of N fertilizer applied as U and CRU was reduced by 25% in 2013 and 2014, and by 45% in 2015.  The 25 and 45% reduced N treatments had no adverse effects on the N concentrations in leaves and pruning branches and the fruit yield and quality of kiwi vines.  However, they significantly enhanced the partial factor productivity of applied N (PFP_N) and the economic benefits, and reduced nitrate accumulation in the 0–200 cm soil profile.  The same benefits of reduced N fertilization were observed for both the U and CRU treatments, but the CRU treatment had the added benefit of decreasing the loss of nitrate through leaching.  We concluded that the current level of N fertilization in kiwi orchards is very excessive, and reducing the N fertilizer rate by 25–45% could not only guarantee fruit yield, but also reduce N accumulation and loss.