Forging Ahead Through Five Years: Agriculture Hitches a Ride on the Internet Plus Express to a New Path to Prosperity
"I never imagined that, under Secretary Zhang's guidance, we'd open a farmhouse restaurant in our sixties and finally realize our youthful dream. Not only did we open the farmhouse restaurant, we also got connected to the internet - to order a meal you just scan with your phone. It's so modern, both good and convenient." Li Xianlan of Erdaowa Natural Village, Bading Village Committee, Wuchuan County, chatted happily with the reporter, her face beaming with joy.
"We don't just want farmers to run good farmhouse restaurants; we want to teach them modern concepts. We set up the Inner Mongolia Yinonggou e-commerce platform on Alibaba precisely so farmers' good products can fetch good prices," said Zhang Dongsheng, First Secretary of the Bading Village Committee, as he took out a business card. He told the reporter that these cards were printed and distributed uniformly, and on them are the Yinonggou e-commerce QR code, the farmhouse restaurant's WeChat meal-ordering QR code, and the village's official account. The Yinonggou online e-commerce platform, which had just opened a little over a month earlier, had already begun shipping online orders, with more than 10 batches of Wuchuan specialty products sent outside the region. Next, Yinonggou will also set up shop on other online stores, covering the county's agricultural specialty products.
Wuchuan County is a major agricultural county with extremely rich agricultural product resources, and building a local online sales system for agricultural products is very important to the local economy. Last year, the "Wuchuan GO" e-commerce operation center of Mengnong Group, jointly established by Inner Mongolia Mengnong Ecological Development (Group) Co., Ltd. and the Inner Mongolia Wuchuan County Supply and Marketing Cooperative, officially launched in Hohhot. Relying on Wuchuan County's rich agricultural product resources, the center follows the "Internet Plus agriculture and animal husbandry" development trend, gives play to market mechanisms, carries out planned publicity, promotion and marketing, creates Wuchuan County agricultural product brands, expands the county's visibility, organically combines physical stores with online stores, generates a stacking effect between the real economy and the internet, and pushes Wuchuan's famous, superior and special agricultural products across the autonomous region and toward the whole country. The e-commerce operation model has opened up a brand-new development model for local agricultural production and development, and plays a major role in promoting efforts to solve the rural problems of "difficulty buying and difficulty selling," boost sales of agricultural products, daily consumer goods and agricultural materials, drive farmers' employment and entrepreneurship, open up rural consumer markets, and spur rural poverty alleviation and development. To implement, build and develop the project well and achieve close integration of online and offline, Wuchuan County provided Mengnong Group with 1000 sq m each of e-commerce office space, an offline exhibition and sales hall, and a warehousing and logistics turnover warehouse.
In 2016, Wuchuan County used new technologies such as "Internet Plus" to drive industrial transformation and development, formulated and issued the "Wuchuan County E-Commerce Development Implementation Opinions," and comprehensively built a new economic development format. It focused on implementing the "Internet Plus Modern Agriculture" action plan, actively advanced the work of "e-commerce entering villages," established an online sales system for agricultural specialty products based mainly on edible fungi, broke through production and sales bottlenecks, and built out-of-region sales platforms. In addition, Wuchuan County also actively advanced "Internet Plus Tourism" services, promoted the application of the mobile internet in tourism public services, management and marketing, achieved information connectivity and resource sharing, built an intelligent tourism service system integrating sightseeing, leisure, vacation, tourism and consumption, and helped Wuchuan farmers onto the path to prosperity.
(Reporter Yun Yanfang, Correspondent Cao Hui)