Hebei Wuyi Leverages the Internet Plus Local Specialties to Bring Home Golden Nuggets of Wealth
A few days ago, Mr. Zhou, a merchant from Anyang, Henan, came to the service center of the E-commerce Entrepreneurship Building in Wuyi County, Hebei Province. He had ordered 100 pairs of Lu Shaojun's handmade cloth shoes online and came today to pick them up. "Handmade cloth shoes sell extremely well in our Anyang. We saw online that the handmade cloth shoes here carry on a century-old craft and are made with very fine workmanship, so we ordered 100 pairs," Mr. Zhou told the reporter.
Lu Shaojun is a villager from Nanshi Village, Wuyi County, Hebei Province. After graduating from university, he worked in Beijing the whole time. By chance, he brought cloth shoes made by his grandmother to his cousin, and as a result many people in Beijing came to inquire, wanting to have such cloth shoes made to order. So he went home to help his grandmother register a trademark and began selling handmade cloth shoes online. Now he has mobilized more than 200 stay-at-home women to make handmade cloth shoes, with annual sales reaching more than 2 million yuan.
Under the guidance of the county government, many impoverished farmers, like Lu Shaojun, have opened online stores. Various agricultural and sideline products with distinctive Wuyi characteristics, such as coarse grains, roast duck, smoked meat and set meals, have seen "both volume and price rise," with remarkable income-boosting results. Farmer Zhao Suying has also felt this deeply. Through packaging and brand registration, she successfully sold more than 10,000 jin of millet online within two months. "Next, I will also bring my old pickles to the market, focusing on the concept of green health," Zhao Suying said as she showed her products to the reporter.
Wuyi County is a national-level key county for poverty alleviation and development. Since last year, the county has continuously expanded its poverty alleviation methods, targeting registered impoverished people, and made precise efforts through e-commerce platforms in the actions of "industrial poverty alleviation, entrepreneurship poverty alleviation and employment poverty alleviation." Each party member and cadre is paired with one low-income farming household for assistance. By visiting villages and households to learn about the paired farming households' situations, basic information has been compiled into a book. At the county's e-commerce service center, the reporter saw the "poverty situation map" divided into categories and zones, distinguishing "blood-making farming households" and "blood-transfusion farming households," guiding farmers to "get online" to escape poverty.
The county has advantageous resources such as metal cabinets, old elm furniture, agricultural specialties and facility vegetables, but none of them had their own brands or registered trademarks. To this end, the county party committee and county government uniformly registered the trademarks "Fuyi" and "Yiren Manufacture." The county established a three-tier e-commerce service network at the county, township and village levels, strengthened the construction of a standardized quality and safety system for agricultural products, signed credit cooperation agreements with farmers, reinforced the development of pollution-free agricultural product production areas, and guaranteed the quality and safety of agricultural products. Using Suning Cloud Commerce, Alibaba Rural Taobao and JD.com's targeted poverty alleviation e-commerce platform, it established the "Wuyi Specialty Pavilion" to deliver farmers' original ecological agricultural products directly to dining tables in the city.
Through the pilot initiative of the "Wuyi Specialty Pavilion," low-income farming households got a taste of the benefits, and the county also saw a new opportunity for poverty alleviation. It therefore mobilized college students in the villages to form a professional e-commerce team and created the "Wosen Zhongxiang Maker" e-commerce poverty alleviation platform, forming a long-term poverty alleviation mechanism of "e-commerce profits, people's incomes increase."
The "Wosen Zhongchuang" entrepreneurial team, led mainly by Lu Shaojun, identified more than 100 designated "suppliers" of original ecological agricultural products among the "blood-making farming households." The entrepreneurial team monitors processing through video recording and cooperates with the government to complete quality monitoring, minimizing intermediate links. "Now we need more talent who understand planning and design to promote Wuyi's agricultural products," Lu Shaojun said.
In order to incubate more high-quality poverty alleviation e-commerce businesses, Wuyi County integrated idle resources and established a rural e-commerce public service center, which includes a physical store for specialty agricultural products, an agricultural product testing and sorting center, and an e-commerce service center, providing convenience and services for the circulation of agricultural products. At present, the county has built 10 township-level comprehensive service centers and 524 village-level service stations. More than 5,000 person-times of farmers have participated in or tried rural e-commerce development, and impoverished households have established more than 100 e-commerce outlets, promoting employment and entrepreneurship among rural youth and bringing more rural talent back. In 2015, a total of 12,000 low-income rural residents in Wuyi County achieved stable poverty alleviation. This year, it will also complete poverty alleviation for 17,000 impoverished households, and Wuyi County is very confident about this.