page_title: Shennongjia
section_title: Economy
hierarchical_section_title: Shennongjia / Economy
caption_attribution_description: English: Dam under construction in a deep valley (probably, of the Yema He River), seen looking down from G209, a few km south of Hongping, in Shennongjia Forestry District.
context_page_description: Shennongjia Forestry District is a county-level administrative unit in northwestern Hubei province, People's Republic of China, directly subordinated to the provincial government. It occupies 3,253 square kilometres in western Hubei, and, as of 2007 had the resident population estimated at 74,000. On July 17, 2016, Hubei Shennongjia was listed as World Heritage Site, the 50th World Heritage Site in China.
  The population is predominantly Han Chinese, the remaining 5% being mostly Tujia.
context_section_description: The district is mountainous and (as its name suggested) heavily forested, which, historically, made forestry the main industry. Over 100,000 cubic meters of timber was produced in the district annually from the 1960s to 1980s (over 1,000,000 cubic metres (35,000,000 cu ft) in the 1970s), but in the late 1990s the focus was switched from logging to forest conservation. Officially, felling of natural forest completely ceased in March 2000.
  The district's low population, compared to a typical Hubei county of a similar size, means comparatively small amount of agriculture; nonetheless, the district tries to put itself on the world map as a  tea producer.  There are mining operations throughout the district.
  As elsewhere in the mountainous western Hubei, numerous small hydroelectric plants utilize the energy of  Shennongjia's rivers and streams.
  Numerous tourist facilities operate along the China National Highway 209, in particular in and around Muyu Town.
  On average, the area remains comparatively poor, with the GDP per capita lower than any of Hubei's prefecture-level units. Of course, direct comparison between Shennongjia and a prefecture-level unit of Hubei such as Yichang or Huangshi can be misleading, since nearly all of Hubei's prefecture-level units have a large urbanized core (with corresponding higher incomes), while Shennongjia does not.
caption: A hydroelectric dam under construction south of Hongping Town, Shennongjia
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