How to Solve the "Pear Sorrow"? A Young Man Returning Home Gives the Answer
Recently, the 2016 National Intellectual Property Publicity Week agricultural product geographical indication on-site event was held in Jinhaihu Town, Pinggu, on the outskirts of Beijing. At the event, leaders from the Agricultural Product Quality Safety Center of the Ministry of Agriculture presented the geographical indication registration certificate for "Maoshanhou Fojianxi Pear" to Li Zhu, president of the Maoshanhou Pear Production and Marketing Association and a university student village official. After years of effort, the Fojianxi pear of Maoshanhou Village finally gained the "precious" geographical indication label, becoming a "golden fruit" that helps farmers get rich, and all of this is inseparable from Li Zhu's years of hard work.
Entrepreneurial Practice with His Heart Set on His Hometown's Pears
Li Zhu is 26 years old this year, born in a small mountain village called Maoshanhou deep in the mountains of Jinhaihu Town, Pinggu, on the outskirts of Beijing. The village is not large, with about seventy households, but it produces a type of pear called Fojianxi that was personally designated by Empress Dowager Cixi more than 100 years ago. This pear has a well-formed shape, and when ripe its surface is rosy, like a big-bellied Maitreya Buddha, full of auspicious appearance. It is also large, crisp to the bite, sweet and juicy, and was an essential fruit for the royal family at the time.
When Li Zhu was little, he heard that the village had produced this kind of pear long ago. Unfortunately, due to the passage of time, the Fojianxi pear was on the verge of extinction, and he had never seen what a Fojianxi pear looked like. In 2008, technicians from the Pinggu District Fruit Office came to Maoshanhou Village and accidentally discovered a Fojianxi pear tree more than 100 years old in a farmyard. They carried out rescue protection, collected high-quality scions, and used the method of top-grafting old trees to graft nearly 100 mu of fruit trees, building a Fojianxi pear base. That year, Li Zhu was admitted to the Business School of Beijing Technology and Business University.
Every summer and winter vacation, he would go around the pear orchards to see how the base was being built. Two years later, the grafted Fojianxi pears began to bear fruit, but because the villagers managed them in a scattered way, quality could not be guaranteed. After tasting them, Li Zhu felt they were far from the flavor he had imagined. So an idea came to him: if the Fojianxi pear was to become a brand and enter the capital market, the degree of farmers' organization had to be raised. On his suggestion, in 2012 the village established a fruit production and marketing professional cooperative - Beijing Yuanbaoshan Fruit Production and Marketing Professional Cooperative.
In the blink of an eye it was 2013, and his four years of university life were about to end. Li Zhu had long since decided his path: return to his hometown to serve as a university student village official and help the villagers develop the pear industry.
Father and Son Join Hands to Lead Villagers to Prosperity
In early July 2013, Li Zhu officially took up his post and became a university student village official in Xiaodonggou Village. While doing his duty as a "village official," he did not forget the matter of selling pears from his own village, Maoshanhou. As the saying goes, "In battle, brothers fight side by side; in war, fathers and sons go together." With Li Zhu's support, his father Li Baojiang, who also served as chairman of the village fruit production and marketing professional cooperative, felt more relaxed than ever before. The village adopted Li Zhu's suggestion to treat the Fojianxi pear as the village's core resource for in-depth development and growth, expanding the planting area of Fojianxi pears from nearly 100 mu to 300 mu, of which 200 mu was a high-efficiency dense-planting industrial park. At the same time, around improving the quality of Fojianxi pears, he helped the village establish a strict quality control system from production management to fruit sales, completely changing the past production and sales model in which each household fought alone. This not only safeguarded the brand reputation of Fojianxi pears and formed a brand effect, but also brought real benefits to the villagers.
In 2013, the Maoshanhou Fojianxi pear, as a uniquely national agricultural product, was included in the list of regional specialty agricultural products of Beijing.
Applying for a Geographical Indication to Put a "Golden Coat" on the Pear
One day in late autumn of 2014, Li Zhu received notice that experts from the Ministry of Agriculture were coming to the village for an inspection. Listening to the legendary story of the Fojianxi pear and tasting the sweet and crisp Fojianxi pear, one expert asked: "Such a good pear, why haven't you applied for a geographical indication?" Li Zhu knew that the "geographical indication" the expert mentioned was the national geographical indication for agricultural products. With this label, it would receive national legal protection, and the pear could also raise its "status." Hearing the expert's question, he quickly replied: "How could we not want to? We just didn't know where the 'temple gate' was." The expert chuckled and told him: "We are the ones who do this. But applying for a 'geographical indication' is not an easy matter. First, it must be applied for through an association; second, the standards are very high, and if the standards are not met, we can do nothing to help." Hearing the expert's words, Li Zhu was overjoyed: "Truly, one may search for something far and wide only to find it without any effort at all. This is a good thing delivered right to our door!" He said to the expert: "With the experts' help, we will certainly be able to do it."
After the experts left, Li Zhu immediately returned home, downloaded relevant materials on applying for agricultural product geographical indications from the internet, carefully studied the "Measures for the Administration of Agricultural Product Geographical Indications" and related legal provisions, and began preparations for the geographical indication application.
During the preparation work for the geographical indication application, he did not relax monitoring and management of the pear orchard in the slightest. Last year, the village's fruit income reached 1.5 million yuan, and per capita fruit income exceeded 20,000 yuan. The Fojianxi pear became a tangible and visible project for getting rich that the villagers could see and feel.
Li Yongming