Livestreaming comes to the aid of farmers struggling to sell produce
Print Edition
ABOUT 8pm, Yin Meiying, the Party secretary of Huimin County, wears a mask and sits down at a table full of specialties from pears to jars of pickles before she starts her livestreaming session.
“Welcome, babies! This is my first livestreaming session selling goods. I feel nervous,” the newbie broadcaster said.
“Baby,” or “baobao” in Chinese, is a common term used by Taobao livestreaming hosts to address their audience, which makes them appear friendly and helps build rapport.
Due to the coronavirus outbreak, enterprises in Huimin, a major agricultural county in east China’s Shandong Province, have been hit by overstocking and a lack of raw materials. Some agricultural products have become unsalable.
To advertise regional specialties, Yin resorted to Taobao Live, the livestreaming unit of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, to sell fruits and vegetables that would have otherwise gone to waste.
“These pears are sweet and juicy,” Yin said. She originally prepared 300 boxes of pears, which were snapped up by online shoppers. She had to add another 100 boxes. Soon, all sold out.
Within the two-hour livestreaming session, Yin helped local farmers and companies sell 10,000 kilograms of mushrooms, 10,000kg of pears, 15,000 eggs and 10,000 jars of pickles.
When Yin is busy selling pears and mushrooms, Lu Yongchun, deputy county chief of Linshu in Shandong, is advertising purple sweet potatoes for local farmers in front of a mobile phone camera.
The purple sweet potatoes in Linshu, which used to be sold out before March, have seen poor sales this year.
Lu’s livestreaming promotion on e-commerce platform Pinduoduo drew more than 200,000 views in the first two hours, and sold 50,000kg of purple sweet potatoes
Li Daoju, a resident of Qianshiguling Village of Linshu County, was among the farmers who benefited from Lu’s livestreaming.
“Nobody came to transport my potatoes, which are my family’s only source of income. Now they have sold out,” Li said.
“Livestreaming e-commerce can reach more potential customers while avoiding gatherings to reduce cross-infection risks at this special period,” Lu said. “It can empower us to boost the popularity of regional specialties, increase farmers’ incomes and help more people cast off poverty.”
As measures to stem the coronavirus outbreak in China disrupted traditional supply chains and forced many offline trading centers to close, a growing number of local government officials are jumping on the livestreaming video bandwagon to win customers’ trust and sell their produce.
In mid-February, A Dong, mayor of Sanya, a coastal city in south China’s island province of Hainan, boosted sales of the city’s mangos via livestreaming on Taobao.
Alibaba launched a rural support project to help farmers find a market for undesirable farm produce on February 6. As of February 27, the project has helped farmers sell 1,396 kinds of agricultural products in 20 provinces across the country, with sales of 58,000 tons.
Wang Zhongwu, a sociology professor with Shandong University, said livestreaming has served as an effective tool for farmers to sell their produce amid the epidemic, and it is permanently transforming the traditional sales model.
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