Guangxi farmer Pang Jianke earned more than 43,000 yuan (HK$48,800) last year from his 3.3-hectare eucalypt plantation on the outskirts Nanning , the autonomous region's capital, much more than most mainland farmers can expect from their crops.
Most of Pang's neighbours have converted their farmland to eucalypt forest and grown wealthy in the past decade, but it's not all good news.
The roughly 3 million hectares of monoculture eucalypt plantations in Guangxi and Yunnan , mainly used for paper production, have been blamed for causing the once-in-a-century drought that has struck five southwestern regions.
More than 26 million people and 18.5 million head of livestock have been short of drinking water since the drought struck Yunnan, Guizhou , Guangxi, Sichuan and Chongqing last autumn.
In Donglan township, Hechi, 300 kilometres northwest of Nanning, 53-year-old farmer Chen Xiufen and her grandmother-in-law need to walk 9 kilometres and cross two mountains almost daily for two buckets of clean drinking water.
Farmer Huang Shaolin, 58, from the same township, said the drought had wiped out this year's sugar cane, grain and corn harvests.