Cold thinking behind the rapid development of agricultural e-commerce

At this year's "two sessions", one of the proposals put forward by Zhang Jin, a member of the CPPCC National Committee and chairman of SUNING Cloud Shang, is to "promote the construction of the circulation system of agricultural products." this time he focused on agricultural e-commerce. Behind Alibaba, JD.com and other giants scrambling for agricultural e-commerce is the accelerated infiltration of the Internet to rural areas and traditional agricultural industries. The active layout of all kinds of capital, coupled with the strong promotion of government policies, the development of agricultural e-commerce is starting a prairie fire. Some people in the industry predict that once the rural consumer market is effectively activated, hundreds of billions of market capitalization companies will be born.

E-commerce of agricultural products has entered a period of development.

This year, the e-commerce of agricultural products in China will go from the "growth period" to the "development period".

E-commerce enterprises actively explore the rural market. JD.com drove a "caravan" to third-and fourth-tier cities and rural areas, and Ali launched the "thousands of counties and villages" plan. "going to the countryside" has become a common goal and a new important growth point for e-commerce, and their "rural" business is becoming increasingly busy. At the same time, the e-commerce of agricultural products has entered the peak period of financing. according to statistics, the original life, delicious 77, JD.com, I buy the net, home urgent delivery, Alibaba, Shoubao, young vegetable gentleman, and so on have received a large number of PE/VC financing, and most of these financing have been injected into the field of agricultural products e-commerce.

E-commerce of cross-border agricultural products has become a new hot spot. In terms of import, Guangdong Province's first cross-border e-commerce platform for agricultural products was launched in Guangdong Guotong Logistics City; Alibaba launched activities to directly approve South Korean agricultural products into China; Shanghai Free Trade Zone successively opened two cross-border e-commerce platforms in half a year; Taobao, JD.com Mall, and I Buy have already opened direct collection or direct mail services for overseas agricultural products. In terms of exports, in addition to eBay, Amazon, Alibaba and Dunhuang, which provide integrated services, there are also a large number of B2C cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Lanting.

"one side of a thousand networks" restricts development

However, behind the prosperity, there are still two urgent problems in the e-commerce of agricultural products.

One is "a thousand nets on one side". At present, there are more than 3000 e-commerce enterprises of all kinds of agricultural products in China, which are still growing. convergent investment and repeated construction are very common, and homogenization is very serious, resulting in disorderly competition, loss-making operation, and the coexistence of construction and shutdown stations. The commodity value of most agricultural products is low, and the transportation cost is high, exceeding 100% or more of the cost of the commodity, which is an important factor leading to the rise in their prices.

Second, the quality of the participants needs to be improved. At present, most of the producers of agricultural products in China are individual farmers, and less than 5% of them have received systematic agricultural vocational and technical education, and the application of e-commerce must master network information technology and electronic technology. such as electronic data interchange, e-mail, electronic announcement system, bar code, image processing, smart card and so on.

Third, the quality standard system of agricultural products is not perfect. Agricultural production in China is still a household-by-household production and management model, with scattered organization, low production and processing capacity, low efficiency and low intensity of industry, so it is difficult to form a strict quality standard system. There are obvious differences between products. The safety of many agricultural products is not high, there are still a large number of unsafe factors such as pesticide residues and hormone residues, and the quantity and proportion of "three products and one standard" products are low.

Fourth, the circulation of agricultural products is not smooth and the information is not well-informed. A remarkable feature of e-commerce is to transform objective physical entities into electronic data through a set of electronic tools, including products, currencies, transaction vouchers, trade negotiations, etc., so it needs the support of a strong information system. However, at present, the release channel of agricultural information in our country is not smooth, the way of receiving information is backward, and there is a lack of unified agricultural information system. The development of agricultural information market is slow, especially the agricultural information service market, agricultural product design market, agricultural capital market, agricultural product processing market, agricultural product storage and transportation and even packaging market have not been developed or formed, and the agricultural information system is not perfect.

Innovate the circulation mode of agricultural products

How to find a path suitable for one's own development? First, strengthen the participation of government departments in agricultural e-commerce. The No. 1 document of the central government in 2015 clearly mentioned that in the "innovative circulation mode of agricultural products", "support e-commerce, logistics, commerce, finance and other enterprises to participate in the construction of agriculture-related e-commerce platform." This requires government departments to support the development of agricultural and agricultural e-commerce from the perspective of policy and law under the guidance of national policy. In the specific operation, the government can use macro-control, taxation and other means to encourage enterprises to make more use of e-commerce; by supporting R & D activities with funds or preferential policies, the government can improve the technical level of e-commerce; in the formulation and implementation of e-commerce policies and regulations, and the identity authentication of online trading users, the government should also play an active role to ensure and promote the safe and smooth implementation of agricultural products e-commerce.

Second, speed up the construction of information infrastructure. First, in view of the outstanding problems of poor information and disconnection between production and marketing in the current development of agriculture and rural economy, agricultural information services should be provided to meet the actual needs of grass-roots units and farmers; second, we should make full use of existing information infrastructure resources and save investment. fundamentally alleviate the contradiction of insufficient supply of agricultural information facilities The third is to provide free information services to farmers, so as to fundamentally solve the contradiction between the huge demand of farmers for agricultural information services and the serious shortage of actual demand; fourth, to adopt the method of hierarchical investment by governments at all levels to mobilize the enthusiasm and initiative of local governments to participate in the construction of agricultural informatization; fifth, to synchronize the construction of the agricultural information network project with the "government Internet" project to realize the "integration of the two networks".

Third, realize the standardization of the name of agricultural products and the grading of quality. It is necessary for the relevant government departments to uniformly formulate the name standards of agricultural products, realize the grading of the quality of agricultural products, and classify the agricultural products of different quality according to the quality standards of agricultural products.

Fourth, vigorously develop the logistics of agricultural products. The establishment of green channel for agricultural products and the development of e-commerce distribution of agricultural products is the key. We should actively cultivate the main body of logistics among farmers. The main forms of this subject include: supply and marketing cooperatives, agricultural companies, agricultural products distribution centers, agricultural products logistics brokers. Give full play to the role of rural cooperative economic organizations and rural brokers in e-commerce of agricultural products and train e-commerce talents.

Fifth, promote the transformation of enterprises engaged in traditional agricultural trade to e-commerce. For traditional enterprises that are directly or indirectly engaged in the production and trade of agricultural products, it is necessary to strengthen the construction of internal information, use Internet technology to establish an intranet, and on this basis, establish an external network leading to the Internet. Enterprises can first set up their own web pages on the Internet, and gradually build into a site, using the Internet as a public medium to carry out product promotion and promote their own products on their own websites.