Agricultural products ride the Internet Plus to leave the fields

Original title: "Internet Plus" helps agricultural products leave the fields

Internet Plus agriculture (file photo)

Yang Kuanmin, a villager from Tuji Village in Luochuan, Yan'an City, Shaanxi Province, has grown apples for more than ten years. In 2015, his apple sales revenue of 120,000 yuan set a record, and his secret to increasing income was e-commerce. "Income was a full 50% higher than in 2014. Going online is great!"

Like Yang Kuanmin, more and more farmers have tasted the benefits of the Internet. Since January 9, when Shaanxi Province, Shandong Province, Guizhou Province and Ganzhou City in Jiangxi carried out the public welfare activity of selling agricultural products online, 180,000 jin of Luochuan apples were sold within 11 hours, equivalent to the annual sales volume of the largest local apple e-commerce seller, and local farmers actually increased their income by more than 20%; Gannan navel oranges sold more than 500,000 jin in total, with income up 40%...

In early 2015, the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development listed "e-commerce poverty alleviation" as one of the ten targeted poverty alleviation projects. As e-commerce gradually penetrates rural areas and rural infrastructure continues to improve, third-party e-commerce platforms have provided farmers with low-cost ways to start businesses online, laying the foundation for widely carrying out "e-commerce poverty alleviation."

In order to promote this public welfare activity of selling agricultural products online, the three provinces and one city specially set up a "network transaction integrity fund" totaling 5 million yuan as a quality guarantee deposit for products participating in the activity. According to the agreement, whenever a quality problem occurs with agricultural products purchased from government-designated Tmall or Taobao sellers, the integrity fund will first compensate consumers.

To do a good job in this public welfare activity, Internet company Alibaba invested thousands of professional staff to handle product matching and online promotion, making full use of big data technology to help agricultural products effectively reach consumers.

As the public welfare activity deepened, sales of agricultural products in the three provinces and one city participating in online trading of agricultural products showed explosive growth. Taking Guizhou as an example, "Guizhou Dragon" and "Qian Wu Fu" cured meat sold more than 53,000 items in total, and "Jiaoxiang" red chili peppers sold more than 20,000 items in total... The farthest single order even "flew" to Australia.

As non-standard products, the biggest difficulty for agricultural products going online is quality control. Liu Xinguang, deputy director of the Yan'an City Commerce Bureau in Shaanxi Province, admitted frankly that this e-commerce platform had very high requirements for agricultural product quality, which taught local fruit growers a vivid lesson.

Tens of thousands of jin of apples produced in Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, were shipped to warehouses in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for the first time, and the pass rate of third-party testing was less than 60%. Liu Xinguang said: "Some scratches during transport cannot be seen before oxidation."

For this reason, Alibaba and the fruit growers improved packaging boxes, transportation processes and so on, and created a three-time fruit selection method, striving to deliver the highest-quality apples to consumers. Liu Xinguang said: "Advanced business and sales concepts are forcing fruit growers to improve their production standards, and also forcing our apple industry to upgrade."

"This public welfare activity is not about how much goods were sold, but about how much good goods can reach ordinary people." Sun Lijun, vice president of Alibaba Group, said that this activity had very high requirements for merchant management mechanisms and adopted various methods such as endorsements, deposits and one-for-three compensation to guarantee the quality of agricultural products.

Big data was another magic weapon behind the booming sales of this online public welfare activity. Building big data on agricultural products on the supply side, building consumer big data on the demand side, and at the same time designing an agricultural product production supply chain tilted toward poor people, achieved targeted poverty alleviation. Chang Zhijun, deputy director of the Rongcheng City Commerce Bureau in Shandong, said that cooperation with Alibaba helps build Rongcheng City's marine food industry chain. With the advantage of Alibaba's big data, in the future it will be possible to try product customization according to consumer demand, change the model of "selling whatever is produced," and "use big data to guide enterprise production, guide farmers' breeding from the source, and help them obtain higher returns."

"In the past, many Guizhou specialties were raised in deep seclusion and unknown to outsiders. Through this online public welfare activity, more consumers have learned that Guizhou has so many excellent specialties, which is a very big boost for Guizhou goods going out." Zhang Miaoqing, inspector of the Guizhou Provincial Department of Commerce, said that Guizhou has now made developing e-commerce part of its strategy to "overtake on the curve."

The difficulty of selling agricultural products has long attracted attention, and agricultural e-commerce has positive significance for solving sales difficulties and helping rural development. Since 2015, the State Council has issued policy documents on developing e-commerce, "Internet Plus" and so on. The Ministry of Agriculture, together with multiple departments, issued the "Action Plan for Promoting the Development of Agricultural E-commerce" to coordinate the advancement of e-commerce for agricultural products, agricultural production materials and leisure agriculture.

It is understood that in 2016 the Ministry of Agriculture will also organize various forms of matchmaking activities nationwide, and at the same time carry out agricultural e-commerce pilots in different categories such as agricultural products, agricultural production materials and leisure agriculture in 10 provinces across the country, in order to make progress in many aspects including promoting farmers' income growth and driving poverty-stricken areas out of poverty. (Reporters Chen Jing, Qiao Jinliang)

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