Taking stock of year one - DITAC Project Meeting

02 September 2022

On August 30, the DITAC team held a fruitful project working meeting to review the progress and plan for the next steps.

The IAMO team and representatives from the project partners, i.e., China Agricultural University (CAU), the Institute of Agricultural Economics and Development, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IAED-CAAS), Macro Agriculture Research Institute at Huazhong Agricultural University (MARI-HZAU), Sichuan Agricultural University (SAU), and Sino-German Agricultural Centre (DCZ), participated in the project meeting. The meeting was moderated by Dr Lena Kuhn and Dr Zhanli Jerry Sun.

The two doctoral students, Junzhe Hu and Hua Zhang, gave a presentation on the status quo of the development of Chinese digitalization mainly based on secondary data collected in the past few months. China has a substantial investment in digitalization fractures. While e-commerce and the internet are widely adopted, the digitalization process during the agricultural production stage seems lacking behind. The rural-urban gap in digitalization development is narrowed. On the other hand, the spatial disparity of the digitalization level between the east and west clearly stands out.

The farm household survey was just wrapped up successfully. With strong support of Chinese partners, we collected data from over 2000 households in 30 counties in five provinces, namely, Heilongjiang, Sichuan, Henan, Hubei, and Hunan. Prof. Dr. Qiran Zhao, from CAU, Prof. Dr. Hang Xiong, from HZAU, and Prof. Dr. Shemei Zhang, from SAU summarized the field trip and the data collected.

After that, the future working plan including the data cleaning and the field experiements was discussed. In addition,  potential collaboration work, for example, jointly organizing conference sessions and special issues, and co-authoring journal articles were also brainstormed. The meeting brought team members on the same page and helped the planning for future work.