Rural e-commerce ploughs deep into the fields of hope

Farmers are both producers and consumers, yet they have long faced the dilemma of "difficulty buying and difficulty selling". Ploughing deep into rural e-commerce and unblocking the buying and selling joints will help farmers increase their incomes and help unleash the enormous production, consumption and innovation potential of rural areas -

Recently, rural e-commerce has continued to heat up, becoming a high-frequency term in multiple documents at the central and departmental levels. On November 11, when many netizens focused their attention on online shopping promotions, the General Office of the State Council published with deliberate significance the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Accelerated Development of Rural E-commerce" (hereinafter referred to as the "Guiding Opinions"). Not long before that, the Ministry of Commerce and 19 other departments had jointly issued another document favourable to rural e-commerce - the "Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Rural E-commerce".

Accelerating the development of rural e-commerce helps further activate the enormous production, consumption and innovation potential hidden in rural areas, helps rural areas and impoverished areas speed up the narrowing of the digital divide, and helps poor people escape poverty at an early date and achieve moderate prosperity in step with the rest of society. What is the current state of rural e-commerce development? Where are the difficulties? How can the goal of "initially establishing a rural e-commerce market system by 2020" be achieved? A reporter from Economic Daily interviewed the responsible person of the relevant department and bureau of the Ministry of Commerce and experts in the e-commerce industry on this matter.

"The current development of rural e-commerce can be described with the three words fast, broad and hot," said Kong Lingyu, deputy director of the Market System Construction Department of the Ministry of Commerce. First, fast. Last year the number of farmer netizens rose to 178 million, with 77.14 million people shopping online, a year-on-year increase of 40.6%, and the scale of rural online shopping exceeded 180 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than 60%. Second, broad. Coverage is becoming broader and broader. Third, hot. E-commerce giants such as Alibaba, JD.com and Suning have all placed the focus of their competition on rural areas. Not only that, traditional rural commercial enterprises, such as postal services, supply and marketing cooperatives and "Ten Thousand Villages, Thousand Townships" enterprises, have also moved from offline to online. As of the end of September this year, China Post had put 100,000 service stations online. Alibaba has established 109 county-level service centres in 21 provinces and set up rural service points in 4,247 villages. JD.com has completed the construction of 700 county-level service centres and developed about 120,000 rural promoters.

While seeing the achievements, one must also see that rural e-commerce encounters many unavoidable and inescapable difficult problems in the course of development, such as a shortage of talent, high logistics costs and inadequate infrastructure. In response, relevant experts say the right remedy should be applied and solutions should be targeted. On the issue of talent, skills training should be strengthened and the Million Talents Plan for Rural E-commerce should be advanced; on logistics, the sharing and connection of relevant rural logistics service networks and facilities among departments and units such as transportation, commerce and trade circulation, agriculture, supply and marketing, and postal services, as well as e-commerce and express delivery enterprises, should be strengthened, the county-township-village rural logistics system should be improved at a faster pace, and multi-station integration and shared-network services should be encouraged, and so on.

Wang Xiangdong, director of the research centre of the Institute of Informatisation at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, suggested that while promoting industrial goods going to the countryside, the space for agricultural products entering the cities should also be expanded. "From the situation of field research, rural e-commerce in many places starts first with industrial daily necessities going to the countryside; by contrast, e-commerce for agricultural products entering the cities and for agricultural means of production lags relatively behind," Wang Xiangdong said.

In addition, many experts also suggested that in developing rural e-commerce, the government should also strengthen planning and guidance, give full play to the role of existing platforms and third-party platforms, and prevent rushing headlong into action, blind development and low-level competition.

The "Guiding Opinions" propose striving to initially establish by 2020 a rural e-commerce market system that is uniformly developed, orderly in competition, honest and law-abiding, safe and reliable, and green and environmentally friendly. How can this goal be achieved?

Kong Lingyu believes that, first, rural e-commerce market entities must be continuously cultivated and expanded. Second, the application of e-commerce in rural areas must be expanded. In rural production and life, farmers are both consumers and producers. This overlapping identity means rural e-commerce must exist throughout the entire process before, during and after production. The intervention of rural e-commerce can not only greatly facilitate farmers' production and life, but also promote the rapid growth of farmers' incomes. Finally, the development environment of rural e-commerce must be improved, with enhancements in public services, market supervision and other aspects.

Wang Xiangdong stated that at present, rural e-commerce models are surging and flourishing, and many innovations have appeared. But no matter how it innovates, rural e-commerce still relies on agriculture. "Agriculture, at present and for a long period to come, remains an important component of the rural economy, and is also an important industrial support for the development of rural e-commerce in many places. The deep integration of rural e-commerce with agriculture will promote the modernised transformation of agriculture," he said.