Hainan sets up fruits & veggies monitoring system, activated in Haikou

Chen Kesheng is the hot pepper grower in Wuyi Village in Haikou City. He harvested 87.5KG hot pepper and sent to the purchase site; however he didn’t leave after the hot pepper was weighed and the money was paid as usual. The purchaser input relevant information of hot pepper into the computer after they were sorted out and weighed. Then Chen Kesheng got a card and he swiped the card on a computer. A device connected with the computer threw up a bar code with some figures on it. The purchaser then pasted the bar code on the packing case for hot pepper sent by Chen Kesheng.

Reporter from Hainan Daily input the figures mentioned above in the software of Hainan Quality Tracing & Supervision Platform for Vegetable and Fruit owned by Department of Agriculture of Hainan Province; then the following information appeared: Product Name: Hot Pepper; Origin: Wuyi Village in Longquan Town in Longhua District, Haikou City, Hainan Province; Producer: Chen Kesheng; Harvest Date: February 13, 2012; Purchasing Place: Purchasing Site in Longquan Town in Longhua District, Haikou City.

"Logging on the software of Hainan Quality Tracing & Supervision Platform for Vegetable and Fruit and inputting the figures on the bar code, any customer is able to find relevant information of the hot pepper no matter where they are sold”, said by Huang Zheng’en, Chief Agronomist in Department of Agriculture of Hainan Province. It is easy for the farm products of organized and large-scale enterprises to realize the quality tracing; however it is the first time in Hainan Province as well as in China for quality tracing of agricultural products by scattered farmers.

Hainan Province attached great importance to the quality supervision of farm products for recent years and brought forward a new concept of "Quality comes before quantity; quality has primary importance”. In addition Hainan Province takes the lead in establishing the quality tracing system of tropical fruit. 13 kinds of tropical fruits produced by 29 enterprises can be traced. In order to help the scattered farmers in quality tracing of their products, the Ministry of Agriculture of the People’s Republic of China cooperates with the Department of Agriculture of Hainan Province to go into the midst of the farmland for investigation and extensively seek for opinions from growers, merchants and customers to determine the quality tracing & supervision mode of "Grower-responsibility and supvisor-responsibility” and realize “one card for one farmer” and “one code for one case”. The specific farmer can be traced in case of quality problems; therefore the vegetables and fruit planted by tens of thousands of scattered farmers can be supervised.