From precision agriculture to value-added manufacturing, technology is boosting productivity and easing rural poverty
The benefits of linking the digital and real economies, particularly in agriculture and industry, took the spotlight at the recently concluded World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province.
Using new technologies to alleviate poverty in rural areas also was discussed at several sessions of the fifth annual meeting, which was held from Nov 7 to 9 and drew more than 1,500 people, including industry leaders, government officials and scholars from 76 countries and regions, to the historic water town.
Key sessions this year focused on ways that advancing artificial intelligence, 5G technology and blockchain, as well as real-time data made possible by the internet of things, can lead to large improvements in productivity in the real economy.
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Huang Kunming, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, reads a congratulatory letter from President Xi Jinping to the fifth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Nov 7. Chen Zebing / China Daily |
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Domestic and foreign participants join the Panel Discussion: The Profound Impact of the Arrival of 5G during the fifth World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province. Zhu Xingxin / China Daily |
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Staff members of a rural products e-commerce company are busy with updating the information on their website in Nanfeng, Jiangxi province. Song Zhenping / Xinhua |
Ke Ruiwen, president and chief operating officer of China Telecom, described how farmers have been helped by improved communication and transportation.
Ke, who told the conference that State-owned enterprises should play a crucial role in poverty alleviation, said China Telecom has invested 110 billion yuan ($15.8 billion; 14 billion euros; ￡12 billion) in information infrastructure since 2013. Eighty-three percent of administrative villages now have broadband, and fiberoptic cable has been extended to more than 500,000 mountain villages, he said.
As a result, 34 million farmers now use “Internet Plus” agriculture – including the placement of sensors on products for logistics and quality control and on plants to enable optimized farming. In addition, he said, farmers are using big data to sell specialized, high-value products to urban consumers. (Internet Plus is the central government’s strategy to integrate mobile internet, cloud computing and big data with traditional industries.)
Transforming agriculture depends on sensors that are cheap but enduring, with continuous connectivity and reliability, Graham Trickey, head of the internet of things program at the GSMA – an association that represents the interests of mobile telecommunications operators worldwide – said at the internet conference.
Trickey said internet of things sensors are mainly produced by Chinese companies, and their rapid deployment in China and the United States is driving down their cost.
In a congratulatory letter to the conference, whose theme was “Creating a Digital World for Mutual Trust and Collective Governance – Toward a Community With a Shared Future in Cyberspace” – President Xi Jinping said the world is undergoing a broader and deeper science and technology revolution and industrial transformation.
Efforts should be made to speed up the development of the digital economy and promote the advancement of a global internet governance system in a just and more reasonable way to inject new impetus into the world economy, Xi said in the letter. He also called for concrete cooperation among countries to advance mutual trust and collective governance in cyberspace.
Viviane Reding, a member of Luxembourg’s Parliament and former vice-president of the European Commission, told the conference that “China and Europe should work to better link our digital economies. … We should synergize digital strategies, coordinate policies, build common standards of technology and ethics, promote academic exchanges and enhance global cooperation in cutting-edge technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence, to better equip our societies and our industries.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, while launching the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation in July, said: “The scale, spread and speed of change made possible by digital technologies is unprecedented, but the current means and levels of international cooperation are unequal to the challenge.”
He said “cooperation across domains and across borders is critical to realizing the full social and economic potential of digital technologies, as well as mitigating the risks that they pose and curtailing any unintended consequences”.
Meanwhile, addressing the use of technology to optimize agriculture, Wu Xiao, director-general of the Department of Rural Economy of the National Development and Reform Commission, told a workshop in Beijing on Nov 6 that Internet Plus technology can give farmers a tremendous boost.
Wu, addressing the workshop held by the NDRC and the Asian Development Bank, said the income of farmers can be raised by precision agriculture, which can significantly increase yields, while e-commerce gives them new markets, and blockchain can create traceable logistics chains. Blockchain is a decentralized, public digital ledger for transactions that cannot easily be altered.
The workshop was held to announce a new ADB book titled Internet Plus Agriculture: A New Engine for Rural Economic Growth in the People’s Republic of China.
Precision agriculture in China will double from its 2014 level by 2020, increasing the yield as well as the quality of farm products, said Paavo Eliste, the World Bank’s lead rural development specialist in Beijing, at the workshop.
In addition, the World Bank is trying to promote big data and internet of things to transform the approach to food safety, Eliste said, adding that the commodity era is finished, since e-commerce allows direct connections between consumers and producers.
At the World Internet Conference, Mao Tengfei, secretary of the Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China in Zhuzhou, Hunan province, said e-commerce, by helping people make money, empowers people to escape poverty through their own efforts. Mao also said an internet platform that has been set up in Zhuzhou links charities with people unable to pay large medical bills.
Regarding the ways that smart technology is transforming industry, Shen Nanpeng, global steward of Sequoia Capital, said “Internet Plus” is changing into “plus internet,” meaning that conventional industry and agriculture are tapping into internet resources.
Technology, in particular artificial intelligence and virtual reality programs, is also changing the industrial environment, including through speeding up and optimizing the design of new equipment and products, the internet conference was told.
For example, Alvin Wang Graylin, the president of HTC China, and Andy Wu, deputy dean of the School of Information Science and Technology of ShanghaiTech University, demonstrated VR equipment that helped Bell Helicopter design a new concept helicopter in six months, compared with the usual five to seven years.
In addition, many prototypical traditional-economy companies are being transformed by the combination of artificial intelligence and the internet of things. Baosteel is using sensor-enabled machines to replace people in the most dangerous or unhealthy parts of the production process. AI and VR also can help the environment, for example by optimizing the processes and monitoring the production of cement in real time, Yin Zheng, president of Schneider Electric China, told a session at the conference.
On Nov 7, Baosteel and State-owned chemical producer Sinochem signed cooperation agreements with Honeywell International, a US manufacturing and technology conglomerate, to implement connected-plant technologies and AI technologies in their factories.
Many speakers at the WIC emphasized that emerging technologies can also pose problems for society and business. People without the right skills may lose their jobs, companies not able to adapt their business models may go out of business, and internet security issues will present challenges, they said.
Harry Shum, executive vice-president of AI and research at Microsoft Corp, said artificial intelligence is going to enable breakthroughs in areas such as healthcare, agriculture, education and transportation. However, he emphasized that education systems need to prepare people from all walks of life for jobs in the new economy.
“As we’ve seen over the past 20 years, new technologies also raise complex questions and important social concerns. As we look toward a future that will see increasing partnership and cooperation between computers and humans, it is important that we address these challenges head-on,” Shum said.
Fadi Chehade, special adviser to the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and co-chairman of the advisory board of the World Internet Conference, said: “There are many new technologies that will … remove jobs from the workforce. There has to be an investment in education to ensure that new poverty is not created.
“I’m optimistic that technology will benefit developing countries. But we need a fair, open set of norms to govern the digital world. If not, we’ll see a continuing concentration of power among a few companies,” he added.
Jan Hinrichs, a natural resource economist for the ADB, said Alibaba and JD.com dominate the e-commerce market, so they can use their oligopoly power to impose strict conditions.
At the NDRC-ADB workshop, Eliste, of the World Bank, said he fears that new technologies could increase demand for high-skilled jobs and reduce demand for low-skilled ones.
In addition, a lack of knowledge and trust limits the number of rural people who take advantage of internet-based opportunities, he said. Although 87 percent of rural households use phones and 22 percent use laptop computers, only 1.5 percent have sold products online, Eliste said.
Clas Neumann, global senior vice-president of Germany-based European multinational software corporation SAP SE, said at the World Internet Conference that the Fourth Industrial Revolution poses a threat to China’s mass production industry. For example, the production of shoes is now being personalized, so existing shoe manufacturers are threatened.
In addition, new types of business models will emerge around the world, he said.
Neumann said it has been very hard for companies in his native Germany to give up internal-combustion engines. As a result, China is now the leader in e-cars, and there currently are no factories in Europe making batteries for such vehicles.
Regarding internet security issues, Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder and CEO of Kaspersky Labs, the Russian provider of anti-virus software, said at the conference that his company detects 380,000 internet attacks per day.
Kaspersky said internet of things technology presents a dilemma for producers. If they don’t embrace the new technology, they won’t be competitive. However, linking a factory’s machines to the internet could make the entire system vulnerable to hackers. He says the only solution is to wall off machines and processes from each other and to connect them only where it is absolutely necessary.
Trickey, of the GSMA, said China is leading the world in internet of things technology partly because the government is pushing standardization and smart cities. He says results already are being seen in such areas as predicting the need for equipment maintenance. In addition to smart cities, the technology is being applied to such things in China as smart traffic, smart agriculture, smart homes and public services, he said.
Li Tao, founder and CEO of the mobile internet technology company APUS Group, said, “China has the advantage of a massive internet user base as well as a rapid growth rate.
“These users generate masses of data through their behavior and preferences in various competitive business application scenarios,” Li told China Daily at the internet conference. “With its large user base, China has strong advantages in data and application scenarios. With the support of State policies, Chinese enterprises are encouraged to research and deploy cutting-edge technologies.”
Chehade, of the WEF, stressed the importance of China’s enthusiasm for technology.
“I have no doubt that China will be an innovation powerhouse. For example, the fuel for building AI is data, which China has much more of than anyone else. At the broad level, Chinese people have a passion for technology that is unparalleled.”
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A staff member displays a wearable medical device during the fifth World Internet Conference. Zhu Xinxing / China Daily |
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Visitors check out Baidu’s image recognition technology at the World Internet Conference. Chen Zebing / China Daily |
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A medical team member checks blood pressure for local residents in Wuzhishan, Hainan province. The Internet Plus system helps to improve healthcare management in rural areas of Hainan. Zhao Yingquan / Xinhua |
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A visitor plays rock-paper-scissors with an interactive 5G robot at the China Telecom stand at the Light of the Internet Exposition during the World Internet Conference. Zou Hong / China Daily |
(China Daily European Weekly 11/16/2018 page1)