National Seed Traceability Query Platform Officially Launched
From county-level agricultural supply markets, from township seed shops, and even from vendors who travel from village to village, farmers buy seeds but cannot judge whether they are genuine or fake, and can only plant them with hope... This is currently the most common way seeds are sold, and to a certain extent it is also the greenhouse soil in which counterfeit-labeling infringement runs rampant.
However, 11 seed companies, mainly China seed industry credit star enterprises, including Longping High-Tech, Kenfeng Seed, Denghai Seed, China Seed Group, Fengle Seed, Origin Agritech, Golden Nonghua, Dongya Seed, Qiule Seed, Dahua Seed and Tunyu Seed, are seeking change. They are entrusting the corn, rice and wheat varieties they mainly promote to managed operations, striving to achieve full traceability of seed quality. The Seed Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture established the National Seed Traceability Pilot Query Platform, which began trial operation on December 21. From then on, farmers can directly enter the relevant product traceability code on this platform or query through a smartphone to identify whether seeds are genuine or fake.
According to statistics, there are currently more than 1,400 seed companies nationwide with licenses to deal in hybrid corn and hybrid rice, and more than 6,000 varieties legally qualified for market operation. Because there are too many seed companies and varieties, and each seed company has a huge number of distributors, this has created great difficulties for farmers in choosing and using seeds and for relevant departments in managing irregular business practices, increasing the difficulty of market supervision and the risk for farmers in using seeds.
"The original intention of the National Seed Traceability Pilot Query Platform is to solve these problems," said Wu Xiaoling, deputy director of the Seed Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture. "By carrying out full-process traceability management in the seed industry, farmers can buy seeds with confidence, and fake, inferior and counterfeit-labeling infringing seeds will have nowhere to hide. After the platform has been in trial operation for some time, the number of enterprises and varieties participating in traceability will be gradually expanded, ultimately achieving full coverage."
"On this platform, full traceability of seed information can be achieved, with real-time connection to the traceability systems of pilot enterprises, enabling queries of basic information on pilot varieties, including variety name, packaging style, approval number, suitable region, enterprise qualifications and so on," said Xie Yan, director of the Market Supervision Division of the Seed Bureau. "Pilot enterprises can achieve full queryability of pilot varieties from base seed production, processing and packaging to shipment, distribution, terminal sales and other links."
At present, 11 enterprises have made preparations. Yu Cai, marketing director of Kenfeng Seed, introduced that Kenfeng, according to the actual situation of the company's production bases and seed processing plants, has set up planting information and processing information collection points, turning growers' field management throughout the entire crop growth process into paper records, entering the information into the system by household, summarising it uniformly, and then having staff at the processing collection points form paper records for the entire seed processing process, enter them into the system to form traceability codes, print traceability labels, and thereby form a full-process traceability chain. Origin Agritech prints a unique barcode and anti-counterfeiting code on each bag of seed packaging, and establishes a system of product identification and traceability control covering the entire process of seed production, processing and sales.