Longyou County lifts farmers out of poverty through e-commerce

E-commerce has changed farmer LanJumei’s life. She lives in Sheli Village, Muchen She Minority Township, Longyou County, about 30 kilometers away from the county seat. In the past, she had to travel at least 5 kilometers in order to sell her local products, but with Taobao villages service reaching out to her hometown, Lan is now able to sell rice and dried bamboo shoots to faraway places such as Yencheng City, Jiangsu Province, at a higher price. She’s very pleased about the change. Lan’s case is a typical example of Longyou County using e-commerce to achieve poverty alleviation.

In 2013, Longyou County and Alibaba began a strategic cooperation partnership. In 2015, they jointly launched the Taobao villages program, and issued the "Opinion on Alleviating Poverty through E-Commerce" in Longyou County in Zhejiang Province. The county would offer a 20 million yuan annual fund to raise the low-income household per capita annual income line to above 4,600 yuan by focusing on 141 villages, promoting entrepreneurship, setting up training base, building platform and logistics system to comprehensively develop rural e-commerce.

So far, the county operation center and first group of 37 village service stations have begun operations. There’re more than 300 items for sale on Longyou Shop on Taobao, and the items are sold across a total of 135 online shops. Since its launch Longyou Shop has generated total sales volume 130 million yuan, created 10,000 jobs, and directly increased poor farmers’ income.

Longyou has matched e-commerce know-hows with low-income farmers in the county to help lift them out of poverty by providing employment, training, purchasing and sales support. In 2015, Longyou Shop helped more than 40 low-income farmer households in Duxiantou Village, Longzhou Residential District to sell mini sweet potatoes online. More than 14,000 kilos were sold online and the average increased income reached 4,000 yuan per mu. Based on cloud computing and big data analysis, Longyou Shop plans to expand the planting area to 1,000 mu in 2016.

In October 2015, 32-year-old LanZhiguang from the She ethnic minority founded the Taobao Village Service Station in his village, helping fellow villagers make purchases and sell local specialties online. In just one month, sales revenue reached 27,000 yuan. Poor farmers in Longyounow enjoy a series of preferential policies such as free training, subsidies, microloans, online shop designs and logistics support when they go into e-commerce. So far a total of 328 low-income farmers in the county have received training and set up shops online.

Hu Shoufa, a 61-year-old farmer from Xiazhangwu Village, Tashi Town used to live under the poverty line. With help from E-commerce know-hows, Zhang employed 60 poor farmers also living under the poverty line to start a processing business. In 2015 Zhang was able to pay his employees more than 1 million yuan, while farmers saw theirper capita income increase by 16,000 yuan. In 2015, processing businesses were launched in all 141 poor villages in Longyou County. It created 31,136 jobs and paid workers a total of 166.14 million yuan in the first half of 2015.

There’re a total of seven ecological migration villages in Zhixi Community, Zhanjia Town. The villages formed a united development plan and made a total investment of 1 million yuan in exchange of a comprehensive fund of 9 million yuan to set up a processing base and an e-commerce base to develop the local logistics industry, and now the village communities and villagers have seen their income rapidly increased.