The National Poverty Alleviation Summary and Commendation Conference was held in Beijing, announcing that after 8 years, nearly 100 million rural poor people under China's current standards have been lifted out of poverty, and all 832 impoverished counties have been lifted out of poverty.
At the same time, the political feature film "Escaping Poverty" jointly produced by China Central Radio and Television and the National Rural Revitalization Administration gives us an excellent perspective on the battle against poverty.
After watching the video, as a rural person, after witnessing many changes in my hometown, the author tried to find a footnote for this magnificent war. The first thing that came to my mind were the six words "If you want to be rich, build roads first."
The "road" here not only refers to the knowledge road to promote agriculture through science and technology adapted to local conditions, the transportation road that runs through geographical space, and the informatization road (network) to eliminate information gaps, but also refers to the "marketing road" and rural people that help agricultural products go up. The road to poverty alleviation - let rural people rely on agricultural products to transform into "new farmers", create "new rural businesses", and embark on a virtuous closed-loop road to wealth.
It is these countless tangible and intangible roads that work together to pave a big network, allowing the cultivation, production, sales, and talent cultivation of agricultural products to converge into a river and rush forward.
1. Rural e-commerce is becoming a new channel for poverty alleviation
Lancang County is located in the southwest border and is named after the Lancang River to the east. It is one of the counties under the jurisdiction of Pu'er City in Yunnan Province and is the second largest county in Yunnan Province. In Lancang County, there are well-known tourist attractions such as Ailao Mountain, ancient tea gardens with thousands of acres, and Nuofu Township Christian Church.
What many people don’t know is that Lancang County is also a deeply impoverished county. In 2015, according to the unified deployment of the country, the Chinese Academy of Engineering provided targeted assistance here, becoming the most remote academician workstation in China.
Recently, after the sixth episode of "Escape from Poverty" "Feelings of Home and Country" was broadcast, a man in Lancang County wearing a straw hat and military training rubber shoes walked into the field to dig potatoes, cut and fried potatoes, An old man who sells potatoes live on Pinduoduo’s live broadcast room and brings 25 tons of goods in one hour has become a trending topic on Weibo.
(picture from the Internet)
He is the academician Zhu Youyong who is known by netizens as the "Farmer Academician", the true story of "Mountains and Seas", the real-life version of "Professor Ling", and "writes papers on the earth" who is engaged in agricultural scientific research. He has led teams to Lanzhou 14 times. Field research in Yunshan Village, Cang County.
Looking back on Academician Zhu’s experience in Lancang County, people can’t help but think of “Professor Ling” in the hit TV series “Mountains and Seas”. After taking root in Lancang County, Academician Zhu found that there was little rain and no frost, making it very suitable for planting winter potatoes. ——Sow seeds in November and December and harvest after the new year. With this time difference, Lancang County can become one of the earliest fresh potato production areas in the country.
Like Professor Ling in "Mountains and Seas", Academician Zhu initially encountered obstacles when promoting winter potatoes in Lancang County because the locals in Lancang County did not have the habit of working in the fields in winter. However, after successful demonstrations such as renting land for planting and selling, it gained followers from the villagers. The winter potatoes recommended by him were grown locally, from an initial 100 acres in one township to 10,000 acres in 17 towns. Calculating an income of more than 9,000 yuan per mu, it created an output value of nearly 100 million.
Different from Professor Ling in "Mountains and Seas", after leading the villagers to grow mushrooms, he encountered the problem of unsalable products and took many detours. With the rise of rural e-commerce companies such as Pinduoduo, Academician Zhu helped local farmers move from production to sales, paving a new path for poverty alleviation.
Specifically, after teaching the local Lahu farmers in Lancang how to grow and harvest potatoes, Academician Zhu learned that the local farmers lacked understanding of the market and brands, and were at the stage of knowing more about new things such as e-commerce and live broadcasting and trying less. In November 2019, Zhu Youyong worked with Pinduoduo lecturers to popularize e-commerce knowledge to students in the current poverty alleviation training class, driving local farmers to expand sales channels and cultivate brand thinking.
In its first training session, 60 trainees from 20 towns across the county, ranging in age from 20 to 50, began to learn e-commerce knowledge such as how to open a store and how to improve store operation efficiency from scratch. Now they are all working on Pinduoduo Open your own online store.
In fact, after the e-commerce model successively changed the circulation of consumer goods such as books, home appliances, and clothing, starting in 2010, the media, experts and scholars began to study the transformation of rural e-commerce in the circulation of agricultural products.
By 2016, 16 national departments had jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting Targeted Poverty Alleviation through E-commerce." At the commendation meeting on February 25, among the 1,501 national advanced collective units awarded for poverty alleviation, three Internet companies appeared, two of which were e-commerce companies - Pinduoduo and Alibaba.
It is not surprising that Pinduoduo appears on this list. As early as October 2020, Pinduoduo won the "Organizational Innovation Award" of the National Poverty Alleviation Award selected by the State Council Leading Group for Poverty Alleviation and Development, becoming a representative of Internet companies in poverty alleviation. , the logic behind it is not difficult to understand.
On the one hand, Pinduoduo, which emerged outside the Fifth Ring Road, is a pioneer in "industrial products going to the countryside and agricultural products going up." As a new e-commerce company that started with agricultural products and takes root in agriculture, rural areas and farmers, it is also China's largest agricultural product upstream platform. Relying on technological innovation systems such as "Farmland Cloud Shopping", Pinduoduo has directly connected more than 12 million agricultural producers, and has brought poverty alleviation. The number of people exceeds one million.
On the other hand, Pinduoduo’s simple and convenient transaction operations based on mobile Internet have greatly lowered the threshold for e-commerce transactions and brought rural residents from the edge of Internet e-commerce to the center of the times.
If the feature film "Eradicating Poverty" believes that "the rise of rural e-commerce has lowered the threshold for agricultural products to enter the market, it has also opened up new channels for poverty alleviation in many poor areas." Then Pinduoduo has further reduced the impact of rural e-commerce. The threshold for businesses has been boosted, and e-commerce has become a promising industry to help farmers.
2. Teach people how to fish and cultivate 100,000 “new farmers”
Compared with the situation in Lancang County where there were no advantageous agricultural products suitable for vigorous promotion at first, the more critical reason that has long restricted the rise of many specialty agricultural products in China's vast countryside is the lack of self-generated e-commerce models and new farmers.
Although many celebrities, Internet celebrities, scholars, and government officials have organized various activities to bring agricultural products, which has provided a huge boost to the sales of agricultural products. However, these aids will eventually be exhausted. After these people who bring their own traffic leave, how to continue is still a problem.
Therefore, in addition to the basics of e-commerce, finding a suitable e-commerce model and creating "new farmers" and "new rural businessmen" that can create their own blood have become top priorities. The evolution of Pinduoduo's agricultural products upgrading system, in addition to relying on the innovation of products and technology systems, is also rooted in rural areas, hoping to achieve comprehensive hematopoietic assistance to farmers in terms of talents and industrial interests.
In 2015, Pinduoduo proposed a “new farmer” system to promote the strategy of “talent localization, industry localization, and benefit localization” to attract talents to return to their hometowns to start businesses.
In 2018, Pinduoduo founded "Duoduo University" to establish online and offline course training channels for "poverty alleviation product promotion and Internet operations". Previously, this offline course has covered 21 provinces, trained more than 6,700 local students, directly guided more than 3,900 stores, and reached a total of 490,000 poverty alleviation industry operators, covering all poverty-stricken areas across the country.
By creating a large-scale and sustainable system of "cultivating leaders in getting rich + exploring technological poverty alleviation applications + innovating industrial poverty alleviation products", Pinduoduo has emerged on the platform such as Wu Atong, who was a Taiwanese IT boss for 20 years and switched to selling agricultural products, and who gave up his green card to return to China. Zhao Yan, who started a business in Xinjiang, Yang Tiancai, a disabled person who started a business, He Shuang, a flight attendant who returned to the "three districts and three states" to start a business, and many other merchants with sales of billions of dollars, as well as the waist power and long tail power of more agricultural product e-commerce companies.
Pang Zhiyu, a "post-80s generation" from Yulin, Guangxi, is one of them.
In 2016, Pang Zhiyu scraped together 20,000 yuan to open a store - 10,000 yuan was used as a deposit for opening a Pinduoduo store, 5,000 yuan was used to buy a second-hand van, and the remaining money was used to collect and deliver fruits from village to house.
In the past three years, Pang Zhiyu’s store has sold a total of 15 million kilograms of passion fruit on Pinduoduo, with sales exceeding 70 million yuan. E-commerce for agricultural products has not only changed Pang Zhiyu's life, but also activated the village, helping local poor households increase their income and get out of poverty. The farmers where Pang Zhiyu lives used to grow rice, and the income was about 2,500-3,000 yuan/acre. Now they grow passion fruit, and the harvest is good. The annual net income exceeds 8,000 yuan/acre.
Similarly, Wang Xiong, born in the 1990s in Shilin County, Yunnan, discovered in 2016 that the purchase price of local ginseng fruits was low. When he put it on Pinduoduo for trial sale, this product with potential for storage and transportation became an instant hit. Now, Wang Xiong’s Pinduoduo store’s annual sales have reached tens of millions. With the popularity of ginseng fruit in Pinduoduo, local ginseng fruit has surpassed corn, chrysanthemum and tobacco leaves, becoming the most profitable crop variety in eastern Yunnan.
There are many such people, and their success has attracted many new farmers to join, thus leading a large number of local young people to start e-commerce. Data shows that so far, the Pinduoduo platform has directly driven more than 100,000 new farmers across the country to return to their hometowns to start businesses.
It can be seen that whether it is to lead rural poverty alleviation or to commit to rural revitalization, teaching people to fish is not as good as teaching them to fish. Only by providing appropriate platforms, models and assistance can we help local villages cultivate industries, talents and create benefits. Only then can we take root deeply and flourish.
3. To revitalize the countryside and take root in "agriculture, rural areas and farmers", we must continue to create blood
The end of the battle against rural poverty is only a new starting point for rural revitalization. Under the general trend of the country comprehensively promoting rural revitalization, rural revitalization still has a long way to go. In this process, rural e-commerce is still the most important driving force, and e-commerce platforms are still critical to the continued development of the "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" industry.
Take Pinduoduo as an example. In 2019, the annual transaction volume of the Pinduoduo platform exceeded one trillion yuan, of which the transaction volume of agricultural (by-product) products reached 136.4 billion yuan, making it China's largest agricultural products upstream platform. By 2020, Pinduoduo’s agricultural (by-product) product turnover will exceed 270 billion yuan, continuing to maintain rapid growth of around three digits. Agricultural products are still growing rapidly on e-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo.
Previously, Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng said in an internal speech that Pinduoduo will make a lot of heavy investments in the agricultural field in the future. Helping to build the Nuodeng ham industrial belt in Yunlong County is a good example.
As a former key county in the country's poverty alleviation campaign, while gradually getting rid of poverty and moving toward industrial development, it also faces problems such as insufficient standardization and scale of ham production, and a single type of products processed and sold.
However, in recent years, through cooperation with e-commerce companies such as Pinduoduo, Nuodeng ham manufacturers have continued to increase online sales, not only broadening sales channels, but also broadening product lines and increasing product visibility. As the reputation and sales of Nuodeng Ham have increased, it has attracted more and more industrial investment, thus promoting the acceleration of production scale and forming a virtuous cycle in the industrial belt.
Specifically, in August 2020, Pinduoduo made use of the East-West Poverty Alleviation Collaboration Mechanism, through the Shanghai and Yunnan Cooperation Platform, and under the guidance of the Shanghai and Yunnan government departments, donated 2.4 million yuan in funds and officially opened a new poverty-stricken village in Nuodeng Town, Yunlong County. Jinqiao villagers group settled in Nuodeng Ham "Poverty Alleviation Workshop".
By the end of 2020, the poverty alleviation workshop is put into use and is expected to reach a mass production value of 60 million yuan, driving the surrounding poor people to work about 10,000 times. The wages paid to poor households throughout the year are expected to reach more than 1.2 million yuan, effectively helping poor households out of poverty. increase income.
In addition to capital investment, from the perspective of China's rural e-commerce development, talent is still the key to restricting the development of the industry. According to the "2020 China Rural E-commerce Talent Status and Development Report" released by the Smart E-commerce Research Institute of China Agricultural University, agricultural product e-commerce has entered a period of rapid development, but the talent gap will be as high as 3.5 million.
Therefore, in addition to investment in capital and technology, Pinduoduo also focuses on talent development in its system to support the upward trend of agricultural products.
This can also be seen in promoting the development of Nuodeng Ham. After the completion of the poverty alleviation workshop, Pinduoduo relied on the nationwide cultivation plan of 100,000 new farmers and continued to invest resources and teachers to help Nuodeng cultivate local e-commerce talents and improve e-commerce operation capabilities, from "hardware" to "software" ”, one-stop allows the thousand-year-old “Nuodeng Ham” to truly enter the highway of the Internet.
All in all, "big country with small farmers" is still the basic status quo of my country's agriculture at this stage. Whether in terms of China’s per capita consumption of fresh fruits, meat, poultry, and eggs, or in terms of the application of agricultural technology, there is still a gap between China’s agriculture and developed countries. To achieve rural revitalization, rural e-commerce and the cultivation of "new farmers" are still a key part of it.
From this point of view, rural e-commerce Pinduoduo, which has helped rural areas win the battle against poverty, still has a lot to do!