Alibaba, govts announce agricultural development plan

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will cooperate with 20 provincial-level governments to both expand its agricultural products on offer and boost China's agricultural development.

The e-commerce company and 20 provincial-level governments including Shaanxi, Yunnan and Hainan provinces and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region attended the JU20 Convergence Strategy Summit for China's New Agricultural Planning in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, on Monday.

According to Liu Bo, general manager of Juhuasuan.com, a group-buying website under Alibaba, it will cooperate with 216 agricultural science and technology demonstration bases, 100 vegetable bases that provide vegetables for Hong Kong, and more than 900 qualified food export enterprises in the country to directly provide high quality, innovative agricultural products for Juhuasuan.com.

From Oct 10 to 15, the first batch of agricultural products from the 20 provinces and regions will be on sale on Juhuasuan.com, including Chinese wolfberry from Ningxia Hui autonomous region, fresh tremella from Fujian province, green mango from Hainan province and hairy crabs from Jiangsu province.

In order to ensure quality, the e-commerce company and the Certification and Accreditation Administration of China announced at the summit to make joint efforts to guarantee that agricultural products on sale online meet the same standards and quality as those produced for export.