China’s Largest Agricultural Trade Fair to Begin This Month

Chongqing- The 18th China International Agricultural Trade Fair (CATF) and the 20th Western China (Chongqing) International Agricultural Products Fair will be held in Chongqing International Expo Center from November 27 to 30, according to Tuesday's press conference. Those two trade fairs are jointly organized by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Chongqing Municipal People's Government.

At the conference, Tang Ke, Director General of Department of Market and Informatization, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, said that the CATF this year will focus on Strengthening Agriculture by Branding to Consolidate the Achievements in Poverty Alleviation, Open Cooperation to Welcome A Comprehensive Well-off Society. In this way, it can create trading opportunities and promote trade cooperation to strengthen the display and sales of industrial poverty alleviation results, improve the brand marketing and production & sales docking, and focus on presenting new formats and products of various agricultural industries.

Meanwhile, the trade fair will focus on large domestic enterprises and brands, consider the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises, and appropriately tilt to enterprises in poverty-stricken areas to stimulate market entities' vitality to support agricultural enterprises in opening up new markets. Therefore, it can give momentum to agricultural and rural economic development, providing consumers more new, diverse, distinctive, and high-quality brand agricultural products.

In addition, the exhibition area for the CATF this year is more than 200,000 square meters, with two exhibition areas - the public welfare exhibition area and the market-oriented exhibition area. The public welfare exhibition area contains industrial poverty alleviation, human settlements, geographical indications, agricultural reclamation, and cross-strait agricultural cooperation exhibition areas. On the other hand, the market-oriented exhibition area includes grain and oil, fruits and vegetables, aquatic products, livestock and poultry, sugar and wine, tea, and large-scale corporate pavilions.

At the same time, according to Tang Ke, 2020 is the second year of the agricultural fair's market-oriented operation. Although the preparations were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the agricultural fair is striving to build itself into the best platform for main agricultural entities to create brands, build channels, and receive orders. The CATF will continue to reform its pace, increase market-oriented investment, and organize exhibitions, according to product categories and industries to stimulate the market.

Moreover, the exhibition will extensively invite buyers of agricultural product wholesalers, large supermarkets, e-commerce, retail chain enterprises, catering, etc. In the meantime, it will add some new procurement channels, including social micro-business or community group buying. It is expected that there will be more than 40,000 professional buyers, a year-on-year increase of 100%. The exhibition areas will exceed 200,000 square meters for the first time, with more than 12,000 registered exhibitors and more than 80,000 exhibits. This year, the CATF is expected to become the largest exhibition among previous agricultural fairs, with the largest number of exhibitors and purchasers and the most complete exhibit categories.

Until now, there are about 300 large companies, including COFCO, China Mobile, Sinochem, Syngenta, and so on, participating in the exhibition for this year, which is three times that of the previous agricultural fairs.

In terms of smart exhibition, the exhibition adopts an indoor navigation information system that allows visitors to find booths, exhibitors, and exhibits through mobile phones quickly, improving exhibition viewing efficiency.

Furthermore, to effectively prevent and control the COVID-19, the exhibition will implement online registration (the official WeChat account of Chongqing Agriculture and Rural Committee "渝农汇 (Yunonghui)"). Everyone should enter the exhibition with his/her own QR code.