Smallholder farmers become the focus of attention at the specialty agricultural products e-commerce promotion fair
At the recently concluded 2014 **Specialty Agricultural Products E-commerce Promotion Fair and** E-commerce Development Summit Forum, Alibaba president Jin Jianhang presented **the e-commerce venture "Vijidani" as a typical case** to everyone attending the plenary session.
Vijidani founder Liu Jingwen told reporters after the meeting that, just as Alibaba president Jin Jianhang said, "Vijidani is bridging the **information gap for smallholder farmers**," enabling farmers who do not understand Chinese to communicate happily with everyone through the internet and live better lives as well.
Vijidani is an online shop launched with the support of **village mutual-aid groups and cooperatives in the Kashgar region**. It currently has established connections with 2,000 farming households across Xinjiang, selling local specialties online including chickpeas, honey, walnuts and jujubes.
It is understood that on Tmall's "Double Eleven" day, the "Vijidani" online shop sold 500,000 yuan worth of agricultural products.
Liu Jingwen explained that in 2013, Vijidani organized agricultural technical training through cooperatives and signed sales contracts with farmers. One farmer with the best sales sold 48,000 yuan worth of dried apricots online, and such income was something the farmers had never imagined before.
The birth of "Conscience"
Liu Jingwen worked as a journalist for more than ten years at the Shenzhen "Jingbao". In 2011, he joined a one-year government aid-Xinjiang project as a volunteer, coming from Shenzhen to Kashgar.
After arriving in Kashgar, to make communication easier, local staff introduced Mahemuti Tursun Amu to Liu Jingwen and his group. This young man, Amu, not only served as a guide for everyone but also worked part-time as a translator. No one expected that from then on they would have this connection.
In 2011, Amu passed the civil service exam, but he felt that such a job was a bit "boring". Amu, who liked to use Weibo in his daily life, saw a news story about "farmers selling potatoes through Weibo" and felt a stir in his heart.
At that very time, Liu Jingwen and his partners were also pondering the same question. With the large temperature difference between day and night, the melons and fruits were especially sweet, but the farmers could only sell through the local "bazaar". Such a harvest ended up becoming a worry instead. Several young people put their heads together: use the hottest thing at the time, Weibo, to help the farmers sell their backlog of specialty products.
The older generation in the villages of Kashgar did not understand the internet, and explaining clearly to the farmers that they were going to sell things on the internet took a lot of effort on Amu's part. In the end, the farmers hazily understood the internet, and the suggestion to use the internet to sell dried fruits was immediately adopted.
To help everyone better identify **the specialty products, after some discussion, Liu Jingwen and his partners decided to name the online shop "Vijidani", which translated into Chinese means "conscience".
What surprised everyone was that the response on Weibo was extraordinarily enthusiastic, and the unsold specialty products quickly sold out.
Liu Jingwen and the others had originally planned to go home for the New Year after selling off the unsold specialty products, but then more farmers came to them hoping to also sell their melons and fruits through the internet "bazaar". Just like that, Amu decided to quit his job and devote himself full-time to selling specialty products online, focusing on developing the online "bazaar" together with Liu Jingwen.
Reposts by Weibo influencers had always been an important channel for Liu Jingwen's team in promoting dried fruit specialties. The influencer "Lao Rong", who discovered on Weibo that Liu Jingwen was using the internet to promote agricultural products, added fuel to these young people's idea.
It turned out that "Lao Rong" was Wang Juntao, founder of the 8848 website and one of China's earliest e-commerce pioneers, and he invested a sum of money in Liu Jingwen.
After raising about 500,000 yuan in start-up capital, Vijidani Trading Co., Ltd. was established.
"Conscience" Alipay
Elder Tudi Mamuti had farmed for 56 years. When Amu and his partners came to Elder Mamuti's home to pre-order dried apricots and jujubes, the elder at first insisted on not accepting the deposit. He did not understand: the goods had not been handed over yet, so how could he take the money?
In Liu Jingwen's view, as soon as you say "Vijidani", many meanings that are hard to sum up are immediately understood by one another. "A Muslim's Alipay is their faith."
From the very beginning, Liu Jingwen hoped that Vijidani could maintain a commercial cycle, with the cooperative that unites the farmers and the company that sells forming a community of shared interests.
When they first started out, **the logistics in the region could hardly keep up with the order volume, and consumers "roasted" them for being as slow as "delivering goods on a donkey". Lao Rong suggested estimating the next month's order types and quantities, sending everything uniformly to Beijing, and once there were orders, shipping them from Beijing to the whole country. This way, the problem was quickly solved.
Amu was responsible for controlling the quality of the dried fruits received, with size and sweetness all having to meet the standard. Young member Li Fang was mainly responsible for visiting the supplying farmers.
Liu Jingwen hoped that through these visits, they could keep abreast of the farmers' situations at any time, tell them market information, and ensure that consumers clearly knew the ins and outs of the food they were buying.
The rewards of "conscience"
In Liu Jingwen's view, Vijidani's hardcore fans were the source of his inspiration. They enthusiastically offered advice on Weibo, WeChat and Aliwangwang. "What should we do if dried fruits are easily infested by insects?" An unnamed engineer told them through Weibo at how many degrees Celsius freezing could kill insects, explaining microwave technology. The advertising slogan, "the taste of childhood", was also thought up by fans. Vijidani's official Weibo posted photos of several Uyghur children kicking a worn-out soccer ball, and before long a fan sent 10 soccer balls to Kashgar.
Amu and his partners would include farmers' postcards in every express delivery they sent out. Every so often, these postcards would be mailed back from places around the world such as Paris or New York to the farmers' homes. The partners would read aloud to the farmers the tiny reflections on the postcards about dried apricots, the land and people.
In 2014, Liu Jingwen also held a nationwide "adopt a small jujube tree" campaign. At the event, celebrities such as Li Yapeng and Wang Xuebing also took part and adopted small jujube trees.
What left the deepest impression on Liu Jingwen was that at the October 16 adoption ceremony for small jujube trees in the Kashgar jujube orchard, many adopters from the mainland who had never been to **the region made a special trip to Kashgar to attend the adoption ceremony.
Zhong Sheng, deputy mayor of Kashgar City, said that the team led by Liu Jingwen used the internet to open up the market for local farmers and solved the farmers' problems in production, financing, agriculture and training. Such a team is exactly what the farmers need.