Who saves who from e-commerce and farmers?

Fundamentally speaking, e-commerce and farmers should grow together to make production more scientific, circulation more efficient, and food safer. Both e-commerce and farmers should try their best.

During the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day, the couriers at the gate of the community are still busy. In addition to those companies that specialize in logistics, there is no lack of e-commerce for fresh agricultural products. It's just that what makes the author wonder is that the frequency of upgrading of these fresh e-commerce seems a little too fast. Often, these families are not yet familiar with each other, and a few new ones have come.

The media reports a few days ago also confirmed the author's feelings. The report quoted industry insiders as saying that more than 10 e-commerce businesses for agricultural products in Shanghai alone have "died" so far this year. Indeed, in the face of the low added value of agricultural products, but the high and difficult costs of logistics and fresh-keeping, if they are not favored by capital and cannot get financing smoothly, it will not be easy for these agriculture-related e-commerce to "live a long life." It is not surprising that the figures listed in the 2014-2015 China Agricultural products E-commerce Development report are astonishing. By the end of 2014, there were 31000 agriculture-related e-commerce in China, of which nearly 4000 were agriculture-related transactions, the report said. But only 1% of them made a profit, while the other 7% suffered a huge loss, 88% lost a little, and 4% remained flat.

Analysis of why agriculture-related e-commerce is ill-fated, serious homogenization and disorderly competition are considered to be the main reasons. In order to seize the market, agriculture-related e-commerce once set off a subsidy war, one yuan fruit, the first order free, the first order gift and so on. However, with the passage of time, people in the industry have gradually formed a consensus that subsidies and other promotional methods can only bring short-term prosperity, and it must be service and quality that will win consumers in the future. In the final analysis, the quality of agriculture-related e-commerce is determined by the quality of agricultural products provided by farmers, which prompts us to rethink the relationship between e-commerce and farmers.

For some time, when it comes to the relationship between e-commerce and farmers, the former is more or less like a "savior" to the latter. In the traditional production and marketing chain of agricultural products, farmers can be said to be at the bottom of the whole industrial chain, bearing both natural and market risks, but have little bargaining power and discourse power. However, when agriculture-related e-commerce appeared, with the help of the Internet, it effectively improved the phenomenon of information asymmetry, reduced circulation links, and made use of the "de-intermediation" effect to promote fair trade in the field of agricultural products. It not only helps to solve the problem of farmers'"difficulty in selling" and increase farmers' income, but also helps to force the standardization of production links from the terminal demand and improve the quality of agricultural products. And the innate "grassroots" temperament of the Internet is also conducive to farmers standing directly in the middle of the trade stage.

However, in the final analysis, the problem of "difficult to sell" is the "docking difficulty" between the scattered production of small farmers in the upstream and the large market downstream. This problem has existed for a long time, although the agriculture-related e-commerce everywhere provides a new perspective and possibility to solve the problem, but to what extent it can solve the problem remains to be seen. According to statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture, the online trading volume of agricultural products exceeded 100 billion yuan in 2014, accounting for only 3 percent of agricultural sales. For now, the power of the "savior" seems to be too limited. In the long run, since the service quality of agriculture-related e-commerce is closely related to the quality of agricultural products provided by farmers, the roles of "saving" and "being saved" between e-commerce and farmers are actually interchangeable. With the development of modern agriculture and the improvement of the scale, organization and standardization of agricultural production, the quality of agricultural products will be better improved, which can help agriculture-related e-commerce to obtain more room for development and more lasting benefits.

Therefore, fundamentally speaking, e-commerce and farmers should be a relationship of common growth. Agriculture-related e-commerce should make use of the opportunity of the deep integration of the Internet and agriculture to achieve mutual benefit with farmers and strive to achieve win-win situation between upstream and downstream. E-commerce and farmers should try their best to make production more scientific, circulation more efficient, and food safer.