China: Season of harvest: Rural e-commerce helps boost potato farmers’ livelihood
Small potatoes can make a big difference. As China prepares to celebrate its first farmers’ harvest festival on September 23, potato growers in Chengde City, north China’s Hebei Province have been busy digging up their "golden nuggets."
Zhang Baoli, a local from Weichang Manchu and Mongolian Autonomous County, is looking forward to a bumper harvest.
"My potato field used to be small, around 100 mu (6.66 hectares), but now it’s 10 times bigger. The produce also went up from 200 to 3,000 tons per season," Zhang told CGTN.
A potato field in Weichang Manchu and Mongolian Autonomous County, Chengde, north China’s Hebei Province. / CGTN Photo
With help from the local government and an online fresh food distributor, 60,000 farmers in the county were lifted out of poverty.
"Potato-growing industry has contributed immensely to poverty alleviation in the Weichang County. We produce over 700 thousand mu of potatoes in total," said Ding Mingya, agronomist at Weichang’s Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Bureau.
"The government has provided fostering policies, including subsidies in mechanized farming and storage facilities," Ding added.
Mecai, a Beijing-based online fresh food supplier, started this program several years ago, creating its e-commerce platform as an answer to the State Council’s call to boost and innovate rural agricultural services.
"We’ve created a direct link for farmers and cooperatives to ship their goods directly to restaurants in cities across the nation, cutting out the middle-man to leave farmers with more profits," said Meng Lingwei, manager of the company’s vegetable department, adding that his company has also provided technical support, including seed selection, sowing, fertilization, and watering.
Online sales of agricultural products in China’s rural areas exceeded 250 billion yuan (36.8 billion US dollars) last year. That accounted for 20 percent of the total e-commerce transaction volume. And the number is estimated to reach 800 billion yuan (117.6 billion dollars) by 2020. China’s continuing poverty alleviation efforts are creating more opportunities for rural e-commerce.
As small they may seem, potatoes are farmers’ golden ticket to prosperity. Now, they have only one wish, a good harvest this year, and all the years to come.
Fuente: https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514f77637a4d7a457a6333566d54/share_p.html
