It is high season for moving in Kunming right now, with many people moving into the city for the first time and many others moving out of the city or upgrading their living situation from the previous year. One of the main discoveries one makes when moving house is how much stuff one accumulates over time – especially clothes.

Throwing away unwanted clothing that is still wearable is wasteful anywhere in the world, but especially in Yunnan, which despite having increasingly wealthy urban centers still has millions of rural poor who could use new clothing.

Since last December, The Hump Group – which runs the Hump Bar in Jinma Biji Fang – has been accepting unwanted clothing for distribution to Yunnan's rural poor, especially in the Nujiang area, near the border with Myanmar. The first delivery of clothing – more than 7,000 items – made it to the Nujiang area just weeks before one of China's worst winters in decades.

Since then, General Manager of the Hump Group Sun Haibo has been working to expand the donated clothing network's reach throughout Yunnan via a donor network of restaurants and guesthouses around the province. Donations now come from as far away as Zhejiang and Beijing.

On the village end of things, the Christian Association of Yunnan was one of the organizations that has been crucial to the program's success – with their numerous churches, they had a ready network that could identify villages in need and help deliver the clothes.

So far over 15 tons of clothes have been delivered to villages all over Nujiang, as well as other places like Zhaotong in northeast Yunnan and even a few villages in neighboring Guizhou province. It has become fairly common for a mysterious package of clothes to show up at the Hump Bar, or some of the clientele to drop a few pieces of unwanted clothes off.

In exchange for their generosity, donors get a sticker showing two clasping hands and the words 'I helped' in Chinese and English. The motto for the campaign is: 'We don't want your money. We just want your clothes.'

If you want to contribute, all clothing must be clean and wearable – any kind of clothing for any season is welcome. Donations can be dropped off at The Hump Bar, call 3646229 for more information.

Tags: Guizhou, poverty, Sun Haibo, The Hump Bar

Yunnan will be one of five administrative regions in China to participate in the project "Green Poverty Reduction in China" with the goal of environmentally-friendly economic and energy development, which was launched at the end of November.

The US$8.5 billion project is an initiative between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), China's Ministry of Science and Technology and a branch of the Ministry of Commerce. Aimed at alleviating western China's poverty with green business and energy generation, the initiative will provide small-scale wind turbines to Inner Mongolian herdsmen and fund production of Chinese medicinal herb Jarrah Dayun in Xinjiang.

The initiative will also target the arid mountainous regions of northeast Yunnan, southeast Sichuan and northwest Guizhou, where it will fund planting of Jatropha curcas L., a tree that thrives in arid regions, adds nutrients to soil and produces large amounts of an oil that can be used in making bio-diesel.

The goal of the project in the region is to expand the existing 27,000 hectares of jatropha trees to more than 270,000 hectares within the next five years, which is expected to add US$65-$90 of income per year to the areas impoverished farmers. The initiative will also explore local strategies for optimizing jatropha's energy potential.

Tags: environment, jatropha, poverty, United Nations Development Programme