Keynote Speaker
Assoc. Prof. Xicai Zhang

Assoc. Prof. Xicai Zhang

Business School, Beijing Wuzi University, China
Speech Title: Research on Governance Mechanism of Agricultural Industry Chain and Supply Chain

Abstract: Agri-food has always faced the contradiction between short-term fluctuations and long-term safe and stable operation goals. Chinese path to modernization is a modernization with a huge population and eating well is always the greatest livelihood. At the same time, China is a typical urban-rural dual structure. The spatial separation pattern formed by the dual structure has caused great difficulties for the security and stability of the agricultural product supply chain. In recent years, African swine fever, the COVID-19, Conflict of Russia and Ukraine, extreme weather and other emergencies have occurred frequently. At present, many factors pose challenges to the agri-food supply chain system, and the security risk level of agricultural product supply chain has increased significantly. The risks of insufficient supply, logistics interruption, terminal distribution, food safety and price fluctuation occur frequently and even overlap. The report of the 20th National Congress of the CPC pointed out that efforts should be made to improve the resilience and security level of the supply chain and ensure the security of the supply chain of food, energy resources and important industrial chains. The safe, stable and efficient operation of the supply chain is a systematic project, which involves the guarantee of people flow, business flow, logistics, capital flow, information flow and other aspects, as well as the coordination of upstream, midstream and downstream industrial chains. Neither the market regulation nor the government can be relied on too much. Social organizations are also difficult to effectively respond. In the new era, new governance mechanisms are needed to give full play to Chinese institutional advantages, give play to the decisive role of the market, and establish a collaborative governance mechanism.


Biography: Prof. Zhang is Associate Professor at Business School, Beijing Wuzi University, China. He also works as Director at China Institute of Logistics and Special Researcher at China Institute of Logistics as social part-time jobs. His main research directions are agri-food supply chain, cold chain logistics and security of logistics.