Forgot your password?
China-U.S. Collaboration on Green Food and Agro-Product Pathway
China-U.S. Collaboration on Green Food and
Agro-Product Pathway (GFP) to Expedite Bi-lateral and International
Agro-Trades
In recent years there
is a major shift of the global supply chains of food and agro-products from
supplier dominant bulk-commodity toward consumer-orientated higher-value
products. This re-orientation is called value chains. These chains place
emphasis on producing, processing and delivering differentiated products with
added values to consumers' preferences.
Quite often value chains are
providing Traceability, Transparency and Quality Assurance (TTA) to meet
domestic and/or international regulatory or voluntary compliance schemes
pertaining to product quality, safety, public health, environment, labor
well-being and animal welfare. TTA may also be designed as a market instrument
to ease pertinent consumer concerns and to win their uptake of a particular
product. Simply put, TTA is "Food Story." For food production, increasingly,
part of the "value" of the product is in the "food story" that accompanies the
product.
In a "traditional" supply chain, the farmer simply supplies raw
material into the chain and cannot influence the price. It is competitive and
the profit margin is usually razor-thin. In a "value chain," all parties in the
chain work together as "partners" to bring the product of unique value into the
market place. Enabling story-telling along the chain that farmers are fairly
rewarded for their labor is one of the ways to add value to the product. The
imperative of this Green Pathway Research Roundtable, then, is to develop a
collaborative project of a food-story value chain for equitable participation of
farmers, their partnering businesses and other stakeholders.
The purpose
of this roundtable is to develop a new paradigm on the green pathway for food
and agro-products. Specific objectives are: 1) Establish a Sino-American Working
Committee on the subject matter as the project team; 2) promote the development
of an operational platform for green pathway; 3) plan and implement
collaborative initiatives; and 4) showcase preliminary results of existing
collaborations pertaining to green pathway.
Key elements of the new
paradigm include: 1) Rural technology innovation and rural development; 2)
Effective wholesomeness monitoring and testing, e.g. rapid test of pathogens or
pesticides; 3) Food safety control and management programs, e.g. HACCP; and 4)
Food and Agro-product Green Pathway Certification (the Story-Telling) Program
for authentication and certification of the above regimes and
outcomes
Rural technology innovation and rural development is the most
critical element of the paradigm. It helps build a rural infrastructure in
support of the Green Pathway. Its essences include; 1) Good Agricultural
Practice or GAP; 2) Seed technology, especially on DNA-based identity
preservation and protection; 3) Advanced fertilizer technologies; 4) Clean water
technologies; 4) Food irradiations; 5) A Common information and communication
technology (ICT) platform to facilitate record keeping and information flow and
to enable story-telling; and 6) Township and village enterprise relevant to the
above technologies.
The Green pathway Roundtable anticipates the
participation of interested stakeholders of pertinent sectors from both China
and U.S. Tangible resolutions and outcomes for expeditious follow-up
collaborations are expected.
