Agricultural supply-side reform from the perspective of precision agriculture

Recently I joined a shopping group that sells fine agricultural and sideline products from abroad through internet e-commerce, and found that these products really have outstanding characteristics; at least in terms of appearance, they are better than the quality of the agricultural and sideline products we usually see in supermarkets and vegetable markets. For example, the large shrimp produced in Russia have their digestive tracts removed and the tracts are white and transparent; compared with the murky black tracts of the large shrimp bought in supermarkets, the sensory impression of food safety is indeed different. However, the prices of these agricultural and sideline products are also relatively high; for example, 10 jin of air-freighted Chilean cherries sell for 920 yuan; 15 jin of air-freighted Malaysian mangosteen in 3A and 4A sizes sell for 520 yuan.

There are still many similar domestic e-commerce businesses focusing on fine agricultural and sideline products. In the Internet Entrepreneurship Park in Fangchenggang, Guangxi, there is a large group of young entrepreneurial e-commerce businesses whose main business is selling high-quality agricultural and sideline products from Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Thailand, for example distinctive fruits. It is worth stressing that although the products these e-commerce businesses sell are rather expensive, because of the excellent product quality and the e-commerce express delivery circulation model, their business is surprisingly good. The shopping group I joined has extremely active orders; some young entrepreneurial e-commerce businesses in Fangchenggang also often achieve annual sales of several million yuan or even tens of millions of yuan.

In fact, these best-selling foreign agricultural and sideline products are precisely the market display of the appeal of precision agriculture. Demand creates the market. As people's living standards rise day by day, domestic consumers' demand for high-quality and highly safe agricultural and sideline products is rapidly fermenting, while our traditional agricultural product (000061, stock bar) supply has clearly not yet fully adapted to such market demand in terms of product quality and food safety, so a very large piece of the cake has been cut away by overseas suppliers. For example, Taiwan, China, is a typical beneficiary of precision agriculture. Not long ago, Chen Weimin, vice chairman of the Taiwan Agricultural Training Association, introduced Taiwan's successful experience in precision agriculture at a meeting and said that the core of precision agriculture is to enable farmers to obtain higher added value. This kind of agriculture emphasizes refined production, distinctive processing, innovative sales channels, and broadening the extension of services. Through resource integration, it awakens rural vitality, provides safe, reassuring, healthy, fresh and distinctive agricultural and sideline products, pursues the essence of enterprise, increases production, lowers costs, and ensures returns.

Reflecting on the above cases, it is not hard to see that the market's demand for precision agriculture is in fact precisely the driving force and goal of the current agricultural supply-side reform, is it not? When attending the deliberation of the Hunan delegation at the Fourth Session of the Twelfth National People's Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out, "Advancing the structural reform of the agricultural supply side and improving the overall efficiency and competitiveness of agriculture is the main direction for the reform and improvement of our country's agricultural policy at present and for a period to come."

At present, there is the problem of aggregate balance in the operation of our country's agricultural economy, but what is even more prominent is the structural problem. Relevant data show that in 2015-2016, China's corn, wheat and rice inventories combined reached as high as 2.54 tons, a record high; in 2015, China's cotton inventory accounted for about 50 percent of global inventory. All of this shows that the quantitative supply of agricultural products is no longer the main contradiction in the development of our country's agricultural economy. The most prominent contradiction at present is that, with economic development and the rise in residents' incomes, the structure of consumer demand for agricultural products has already undergone obvious changes. Under the condition of solving the problem of having enough to eat, people pursue more the need to eat well, to emphasize safety, quality and health preservation. But the reality is that agricultural development cannot keep up with changes in the market consumption structure, the supply of mid- and high-end agricultural products is insufficient, the multifunctional development of agriculture is inadequate, and many emerging needs cannot be satisfied. In the supply of agricultural products, on the one hand it is difficult to meet people's needs in terms of quality, and on the other hand a large number of agricultural products are in excess and unsalable. In this structural contradiction of insufficient effective supply, what is increased in production is often not necessarily what is needed, while what is reduced in production is precisely what demand must have satisfied.

Last year's Central Rural Work Conference, proceeding from the perspective of the agricultural supply side, already proposed a "prescription" for resolving the main contradiction in our country's agricultural development, namely "strive to strengthen the structural reform of the agricultural supply side, improve the quality and efficiency of the agricultural supply system, make the quantity, variety and quality of agricultural product supply fit consumers' needs, and truly form an effective supply of agricultural products with a reasonable structure and strong guarantees." To realize such a policy adjustment, the first thing is to change the way of thinking and transform the mode of agricultural development. Therefore, to solve the problem of structural imbalance on the agricultural supply side, the first priority is to firmly establish from the source the concept of organizing production around demand and around consumption, fully give play to the role of the market, make agricultural producers truly become market operating entities, match planting and breeding structures with market demand, increase the supply of green and organic safe agricultural products, increase the supply of distinctive agricultural products, reduce the supply of ordinary agricultural products, and promote agricultural production to shift from being mainly quantity-oriented to placing equal emphasis on quantity and quality, paying more attention to efficiency and to market orientation, and better satisfying consumer demand. From this angle, the mature experience accumulated by Taiwan in the process of developing precision agriculture is indeed worthy of our good reference.