How Agricultural Product Logistics Stimulates Market Vitality

From September 20 to 21, the “National Agricultural Product Circulation Network Backbone Market Strategic Cooperation Development Forum and the 2014 China South China Agricultural Business Industry Summit Forum” was held in Maoming, Guangdong. Nearly 300 government officials, authoritative experts, well-known scholars, and industry elites from all over the country gathered together to discuss the major plans for the development of agricultural wholesale markets. During the forum, the establishment and awarding ceremony of the “National Agricultural Product Circulation Network Backbone Market Alliance” was held, showing a new trend of resource integration and joint development in the agricultural product market industry. Our reporter believes that the formation of the agricultural product wholesale market alliance may, within a not-too-long period of time, greatly change the current situation in which traditional agricultural wholesale markets each act on their own, achieve efficient integration and utilization of market resources, and is expected to make greater contributions to driving the development of modern agriculture in our country.

⟦NL> Experts attending the meeting and representatives generally agreed that the era of joint development through cross-sector alliances among agricultural wholesale markets has arrived. Gao Tiesheng, chairman of the China Market Society, stressed in his speech at the forum that improving the circulation of agricultural products is an issue that the Central No. 1 Document has paid attention to year after year in recent years and that people across the country are also concerned about. The full development of the national market requires every agricultural wholesale market to have a sense of responsibility of “being at the grassroots level while keeping the temple in mind,” and to jointly promote agricultural products to have their rightful place in the supply chain. Ding Junfa, director of the Expert Steering Committee of China Commodity Trading Markets and chief consultant of the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, believes that the characteristics of agricultural product logistics determine that its development must receive full support from government departments. Platforms between agricultural wholesale markets should be extended as much as possible, and research institutions should produce more research results that promote agricultural product logistics. Zhang Yuxi, executive president of the China Agricultural Products Market Association, stressed in his speech at the forum that China is a large agricultural country, but the brand competitiveness of agricultural products is too weak. Too many and too mixed local brands are equivalent to having no brand. In launching agricultural products such as geographical indication brands, all localities must first fully integrate resources themselves. Lu Mingyi, deputy editor-in-chief of our newspaper, pointed out at the forum that the situation of small-scale production and a large market for agricultural products in our country will still not undergo a fundamental change in the short term; under such circumstances, discussing deep cooperation among agricultural wholesale markets will help solve the blindness of market supply and demand and the problem of information asymmetry.

The establishment of the agricultural product wholesale market alliance can be said to be a pioneering undertaking of all-round coordinated cooperation in the field of agricultural product circulation, and thus received high attention from people inside and outside the industry as well as the media. Zhang Yi, one of the initiators of the alliance and general manager of Guangdong Maoming Zhongsheng Company, explained the specific connotation of the alliance at the forum, saying that with China’s backbone agricultural wholesale markets as the core, establishing a nationwide cross-sector alliance of backbone markets and holding exhibitions regularly and irregularly every year to strengthen interaction and exchange among markets not only promotes the construction of a platform for industry-university-research-application but can also solve the difficulty of insufficient discourse power at the market level for a single enterprise, achieving twice the result with half the effort, and can even use the power of the market alliance to expand. From the historical task proposed in the 2014 Central “No. 1 Document” of comprehensively “strengthening the construction of a national market circulation network with large agricultural product wholesale markets as the backbone” and “strengthening the construction of agricultural product e-commerce platforms,” to the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Agriculture and other relevant ministries successively carrying out nationwide work on building backbone markets in the national agricultural product circulation network, to the Wholesale Market Development Committee of the China Market Society and the Maoming West Guangdong Agricultural and Sideline Products Comprehensive Trading Center jointly initiating the establishment of the agricultural product wholesale market alliance, to more than 40 representatives of key national agricultural product wholesale backbone markets witnessing the establishment of the “National Agricultural Product Circulation Network Backbone Market Alliance,” in just half a year people can see the industry’s positive response to the development trend advocated by the central government and government departments.

When the forum was held, it coincided with Alibaba’s listing in the United States, and Ma Yun as well as the development prospects of e-commerce also became one of the topics of general concern among participants. Li Jianzhong, chairman of the China Commodity Trading Market Council, believes that Ma Yun’s claim that online transactions will exceed offline transactions is impossible, because physical stores also develop online transactions together with offline transactions. Zhang Yuxi, executive president of the China Agricultural Products Market Association, believes that e-commerce will not overturn offline markets within 10 years, but it is a very good supplement and should be given full attention. The reporter noted that during the special report stage of the forum, Wen Qi, associate researcher at the Beijing Business Management Cadre College, after completing the keynote report, answered five consecutive questions from the audience, mainly about e-commerce. It is understood that there are currently more than 100,000 e-commerce businesses nationwide. In 2013, the transaction scale of China’s e-commerce market reached 10.5 trillion yuan, of which 30,000 were agriculture-related. In the whole of 2013, agricultural product e-commerce exceeded 100 billion yuan, and in the first half of 2014 agricultural product e-commerce had exceeded 170 billion yuan, and it is expected to exceed 300 billion yuan for the whole year. Our reporter believes that e-commerce will surely become an emerging high-quality channel for the sale of China’s agricultural products, and will have a positive impact on solving the “difficulty of buying” and “difficulty of selling,” as well as “cheap vegetables hurting farmers” and “expensive vegetables hurting the people.”