Ministry of Agriculture to use big data to regulate agricultural production and consumption

Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, November 26 (Reporter Guo Yujing) Wang Xiaobing, Deputy Director of the Market and Economic Information Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, recently stated that China's agricultural e-commerce is currently developing rapidly, but bottlenecks and pain points are becoming increasingly prominent. In the future, it is necessary to cultivate multiple types of entities, make good use of big data from e-commerce platforms, regulate the production and consumption of agricultural products, and build an agricultural big data system.

At the special event of the “Teng Plan” during the 2015 National E-commerce Innovation Promotion Conference held here, Wang Xiaobing introduced that rural e-commerce in China currently shows four characteristics: First, agricultural e-commerce in the central and western regions is showing a scattered development trend, and impoverished areas are achieving rapid development with the help of the Internet; second, rural e-commerce is extending from the transaction stage to the two stages of production and consumption; third, agricultural product e-commerce is developing from dried agricultural products to fresh agricultural products, with agricultural production materials and sightseeing agriculture expanding in an all-round way; fourth, various rural e-commerce models are constantly emerging.

Wang Xiaobing said that in 2014, agriculture-related e-commerce reached 3.1 million, and the online retail sales of agricultural products exceeded 100 billion yuan. Although rural e-commerce is developing rapidly and has huge potential, bottlenecks are also becoming increasingly prominent. In 2014, agricultural product e-commerce sales accounted for only about 3% of national agricultural product sales. Compared with the proportion of online retail sales accounting for about 10% of the national total retail sales of consumer goods, it was still 7 percentage points lower.

Wang Xiaobing believes that accelerating the development of agricultural e-commerce is an important way to form agricultural big data and reflect the value of data. Data has become a basic strategic resource of the country. Agricultural e-commerce has a major impact on agricultural production, circulation, and consumption. It is an important channel for obtaining agricultural data in the information age, an important platform for using data to directly regulate production and consumption, and an important component of the agricultural big data system.