Internet Plus grain faces triple security risks

"Our main business right now is visiting large grain enterprises, hoping to attract these enterprises to register as members on our website and conduct raw grain transactions through the Internet. As long as we can gain a small share of the massive grain trade, the future development scale of the enterprise will be astonishing."

For a whole day, Liu Kai's (pseudonym) mobile phone was almost always in a state of no one answering. It was not until the evening that the reporter got through to the person in charge of the business department of a large domestic grain electronic trading platform. He told the reporter that they have recently been seeking partners in various places in order to rapidly expand the platform's influence and open up the market.

"Grain is a bulk commodity transaction, and our country's annual grain transaction volume is massive. However, bulk raw grain transactions still belong to traditional trading methods, so perhaps it is the last industry that the 'Internet' can tap into," Liu Kai said.

What kind of difference can "Internet Plus" bring to the traditional grain industry?

The answer to this question can perhaps be partly discerned from the following set of data:

As of September 2014, a total of more than 100 million tons of national policy-related grain and oil had been transacted through the China Grain Network e-commerce platform, with a transaction amount exceeding 200 billion yuan.

Hong Tao, director of the Commercial Economics Research Institute of Beijing Technology and Business University and dean of the China Food (Agricultural Products) Safety E-commerce Research Institute, who provided this set of data, said in an interview with a reporter from Legal Daily that with the vigorous development of grain e-commerce, the security issues therein have gradually attracted industry attention.

Industry transformation

Can grain e-commerce be understood as buying and selling grain online?

Hong Tao's answer is "no."

His explanation is: since 2004, our country has gradually implemented the minimum purchase price policy for rice and wheat. By concentrating a portion of grain sources through methods such as the minimum purchase price, and then using electronic means such as online transactions, these grain sources can be quickly put onto the market at critical moments, achieving the purpose of stabilizing the grain market and conducting grain macroeconomic regulation. As a result, a grain e-commerce model has gradually formed, mainly based on national policy grain transactions, supplemented by personalized grain e-commerce.

In fact, before Liu Kai set his sights on the blue ocean of "bulk grain transactions," much capital had already entered in advance.

"Grain is a bulk commodity, and grain e-commerce is also part of bulk commodity electronic trading. The construction of the bulk commodity electronic trading market can not only promote spot circulation, but also form a pricing center, thereby driving the development of finance, logistics and other industries. It has stimulated great enthusiasm among local governments in various places and has shown a trend of vigorous development in recent years," Hong Tao said.

The reporter noted that multiple online grain trading platforms claim that online grain bidding transactions break through traditional spatial limitations and can provide 24-hour all-weather business hours, giving them more opportunities to sell products to more distant places. At the same time, agricultural e-commerce can scale up geographically dispersed, small, and individual agricultural product transactions.

The person in charge of a bulk grain trading platform in Beijing said that the greatest advantage of an e-commerce platform lies in making grain price information public, publishing price information conveniently and promptly, simple operation, and flexibility and convenience; accelerating the speed of grain transactions, reducing costs, and reducing the waste of human resources, "at the same time, using the Internet's fast and cross-regional advantages for information transmission, changing the trading model, and not being limited by geographical location, especially for transactions in different locations."

Multiple risks

Although the traditional grain industry is rapidly integrating with the Internet, some industry experts who declined to be named also said they are not optimistic about the hasty combination of these two industries.

One reason for being "not optimistic" is that our country's grain e-commerce faces many security hazards.

"The more prominent one is information security. If grain information is illegally stolen or leaked, it may bring serious consequences and huge economic losses to the grain trading market, grain enterprises, and others. If accurate and complete information cannot be obtained in a timely manner, the grain trading market and grain enterprises will be unable to correctly analyze and judge transactions and unable to make rational decisions. The illegal deletion of transaction information and the loss of transaction information may lead to economic disputes and cause economic losses to one or more parties to the transaction." Regarding the adverse consequences of grain information security, Hong Tao candidly said it is "more severe than the public imagines."

He said that the most common information risk is the illegal theft and leakage of information, which often triggers a chain reaction and forms subsequent risks. A typical manifestation is online fraud, which not only causes major economic losses to grain trading entities, but more importantly may cause people to lose confidence in grain e-commerce, this new economic form.

Another security hazard is transaction security. Hong Tao explained that grain e-commerce transaction security refers to various unsafe factors existing in the grain e-commerce transaction process, including security issues in transaction confirmation, the provision of goods and services, the quality of goods and services, and payment for goods.