Across China: Fruit farmers harvesting profits through e-commerce

Du Congxue, a veteran loquat farmer in southwest China's Sichuan Province, has just sold his fruit for the first time in his life to buyers in Beijing, thousands of miles away.

The specialty of Renshou County has been sold on JD.com, China's biggest Internet-based direct retailer, since Monday under an agreement signed between the e-commerce giant and the local government.

In the first arrangement of its kind in China, Renshou committed to sell the bulk of its harvest online, exclusively through one platform. The county has set aside 14,000 hectares of organic crops for sale through JD.com this summer.

A 1.5-kg box of fruit from Du's Shijia Village sells on JD.com for 119 yuan (19 U.S. dollars), almost twice the asking price in Renshou markets. Thanks to local logistics infrastructure set up by JD, the peach-like ovals are distributed by air and the journey from trees to Beijing takes just 36 hours.

In the kind of efficient Internet-based business model being popularized across China, the fruit is now sold according to demand, with Renshou farmers eschewing their previous heavy reliance on wholesalers.

Loquat fruits rot easily and lots of them used to go bad while sitting in wholesalers' warehouses, cutting into farmers' profits, said Du.

This is an example of e-commerce players putting more resources into the burgeoning rural market, encouraged by the government's "Internet Plus" strategy that is challenging traditional sectors to embrace digital technology and boost efficiency.

JD.com has established more than 20 county-level "service centers" in Sichuan, serving more than 2,500 townships, to bring residents' online shopping into the province and speed local merchandise out of it.

It has also set up smaller warehouses in over 50 counties, facilitating farmers in 10,000 villages to sell their produce online -- and of course buy goods on JD.com.

Rival e-commerce giant Alibaba said late last year it planned to invest 10 billion yuan to spread its logistics infrastructure to cover a third of China's counties and a sixth of its rural areas in three to five years.

Alibaba certainly knows the size of the prize, forecasting that the value of online sales in rural China would grow from an estimated 180 billion yuan in 2014 to 460 billion yuan in 2016.

Such hype has made Du ambitious. "We want to sell loquat fruit across the country and even abroad through the Internet," he said. Endi