From Our
Correspondent
BEIJING: Pakistan is undergoing a fast e-commerce development in last few years and the government is working with some of Chinese companies to establish e-commerce platform as part of poverty alleviation program, Pakistan Ambassador to China Moin ul Haque said.
Pakistan is also undergoing a really fast e-commerce development in the last few years. The e-commerce platform Daraz which was bought by Alibaba is doing very well. We are working with some of the Chinese companies to establish certain e-commerce platform in Pakistan as part of our poverty alleviation program called Ehsaas, which is doing very well, he said. Ambassador Haque also fully realizes that innovation played an important role in poverty alleviation in China.
The e-commerce platform has been used to market the farm products of the villages in China as a part of the poverty alleviation strategy. Farmers were given training about the use of mobile, how to e-commerce stores, branding of the products, etc. In 2020, e-commerce sale in China was about $18 trillion, the highest in the world.
He also mentioned the importance of cold chain and logistics in the agricultural industry chain. Because we lack infrastructure of cold chain and logistics, most of our farm products are wasted from farms to the market. We require more investments into our cold chain industry and storage modernization. We are working with Chinese authorities to update our cold chain in logistics, he added.
On information platform of China-Pakistan Agricultural and Industrial platform jointly initiated by China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) and China Economic Net (CEN) he said, would like to thank China Economic Net for taking this initiative of establishing this very important platform for industry, agriculture, industry, corporation.
Ambassador Haque said, Being an agriculture country, a very strong, great economy, we need to modernize our agriculture. We need to have better seeds, a modern irrigation system, a high yield of our crops. Also, I think we lack investment or better infrastructure in our cold chain network. These are all very important areas in which China has a large success.
Having been Pakistani ambassador in China for several months, Moin ul Haque has witnessed the remarkable achievement in alleviating poverty in China. Taking more than 800 million people out of absolute poverty is a miracle of recent times. We are going to learn from this experience, he added.
To a question of whether he has got a vaccination in China, Ambassador Haque said, Not (been vaccinated) yet.
Whenever the time is there and we would get vaccinated. But I’m not under any stress for that because I am in the safest country which has controlled the pandemic to a large extent, he said.
Recently, Pakistan has registered and cleared the use of the Sinopharm vaccine in Pakistan. Last week, the foreign minister of China Wang Yi announced a donation and a gift of 500,000 vaccines from Sinopharm to Pakistan. We are now working very closely and hopefully that will be transported to Pakistan by the end of this week, said Ambassador Haque.
During the epidemic, Lianhua Qingwen Capsule, traditional medicine in China for COVID-19 treatment, has been submitted to the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan for approval. Yinhuang Qingfei Granule has also passed clinical trials in Pakistan.
