Internet Plus and the Three Rural Issues: More Than Just E-commerce Reaching the Villages
"Internet Plus" brings a new future to the "Three Rural Issues" of agriculture, rural areas and farmers; a strong agriculture, prosperous farmers and beautiful rural areas are worth looking forward to.
Among the current buzzwords, "Internet Plus" is absolutely one of the top-ranked. People in traditional industries are all striving to imagine what disruptive changes their industries will undergo once "Internet Plus" is realized. People in the "Three Rural Issues" field are no exception.
Agriculture can be described as the most traditional of traditional industries. As the era of "Internet Plus" draws ever nearer, such an industry is destined to change. In fact, some changes have already taken place. For some time now, rural e-commerce, which has been developing vigorously in certain areas, has been a representative of such changes.
Data shows that by 2013 alone, on the Taobao and Tmall platforms, parcels sent from county-level areas reached 1.4 billion, and online stores registered in rural areas (including county towns) exceeded 2 million. By the end of 2014, 211 Taobao villages had appeared in China, covering 70,000 online stores. And such changes were not limited to the eastern region. In the first half of 2014, among the 25 counties with the fastest year-on-year growth in online store transaction volume, 19 came from the western region.
On the surface, it is the explosive growth in the number of online stores and Taobao villages, but behind it are more profound changes. Agricultural products that once suffered from poor sales channels are no longer far from the vast market; rural youth who once had no way to find employment now have a new platform for starting businesses and finding jobs; farmers' path to increasing income, which once lacked momentum, now has new avenues; and the rural consumer market, which once lacked vitality, has seen exciting new growth points. Based on this, some localities have already made developing rural e-commerce the first choice in their "Internet Plus" action plans for the "Three Rural Issues."
The future of "Internet Plus" for the "Three Rural Issues" is indeed worth looking forward to. But "Internet Plus 'Three Rural Issues'" should not be limited to rural e-commerce. Since the internet arrived in China, it has gone through several stages, from tool to channel, from infrastructure to internet economy, and today's "Internet Plus" means even more infinite possibilities. Some say that the era of "Internet Plus" has given traditional agriculture, backward rural areas and disadvantaged farmers an excellent opportunity to win from behind on the journey toward modernization. Others say that giving modern agriculture the wings of the internet will be the next big opportunity. If so, is it a bit too modest in ambition to limit "Internet Plus" to rural e-commerce?
Although phenomena such as the urban-rural digital divide and rural information islands still exist to a certain extent, the internet has already demonstrated certain capabilities in bridging the urban-rural gap and forcing reform of the "Three Rural Issues." Internet Plus agriculture: the application of modern information technologies such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing, along with smart equipment, in agricultural production and operation has improved agricultural production efficiency and benefits, giving new possibilities to the transformation of agricultural development modes that were once fraught with difficulties. Internet Plus farmers: internet thinking and information technology have produced a group of "new farmers." Compared with traditional farmers of the past, their production and lifestyles are greatly different, and the question of "who will farm the land" seems to have found a possible solution. Internet Plus rural areas: the construction of rural information infrastructure and the accompanying public service models; hardware changes the traditional face of the countryside, software changes rural lifestyles, and rural transformation has entered a new era.
Some time ago, the author met a large-scale grain farmer who used "field agriculture Internet of Things" technology on more than 10,000 mu of transferred land, and one person could control the irrigation of 3,000 mu of land. This was unimaginable in the past, but now it has become reality. Just like this large-scale grain farmer's longing for a better life in the future, in the era of "Internet Plus," a strong agriculture, prosperous farmers and beautiful rural areas are worth looking forward to.