Mr Tong Yeung: The Three important elements to push the company+cooperative
Here is the written record:
Your Excellencies and guests, Dear friends. I am Tong Yeung from Mecilla LTD. The main business of our company is about the organic cotton promotion and production. Started from 2010, my crew and Mr Zheng, included the crew handle the social sustainable agriculture and some youngsters to discover the suitable way to start the new model of sustainable agriculture. In recently, we had been hold the' Organic cotton experts exchange meeting ', we let the experts from Swiss, USA and Israel etc get into the community and see how it is developing the modern organic cotton industry. We spent many time to bond with the on Procurement research and improvement aspects of irrigation water, composting technology, marketing strategy, non-transgenic seeds, and the promotion on Ecological diversity etc. Beyond the theory, we did the discuss, experiment and detract very deeply.
I am from Hong Kong, I am not the people who grow up from rural, so it is my pleasure when I had the chance get into the the deep sides of rural and did the commerce with the locals and see what can we do as a Hong Kong people. We summed up some issue and challenge which hinder the community be more organic. We did lots of consideration on advance the community, and what role can we be and what way should we put effort on, while the process of whole community to develop the sustainable agriculture. For example, we look forward to the international certification, because we knew what the market of Hong Kong, USA and Swiss needs. Somebody asked about can the products from the community be certificate by international. What I say is definitely able to do it, we got two system to match up, although the outcome may not fulfill our expects at the moment, but we will keep pushing and improving till it can one day. In upcoming years we prior to carry and try the non-transgenic cultivation, effective irrigation and the collective composting, we tried in small scale in the beginning. Last year, we through the supported from peers and we developed the first experimental farm, which is for us to try some new way on on-transgenic cultivation, effective irrigation and the collective composting, if the results is good we will share our profits through the cooperative to the locals, if the results is not in process, we will do it better in future. Those are the reason why we did the experimental farm.
Beyond to the hard work of discuss and cooperation with the locals in recently years, it is not by chance, because we aims to recover the land fertility, we met Mr Zheng and his teams when we knew we got same faith on recover the land fertility and turn it to organic and be more sustainable development, we want to last the land fertility in long terms and also increase the Per mu. Those are the first point we collected with the community as the base. To be simple we have two more points, and the second point is about the talent. In Hong Kong and Guangzhou, there are many talent who received higher education are now willing to services for the community, we can find the talent from the school, we provided the perform for the community and let the talent stick together, we can let the people from urban to get more in touch not only what skills they need in agriculture, but also train up their ability of agricultural technology and management skills. I am so lucky because one of my crew who had been Holland studied master degree, and he is well in sustainable agriculture , beside of that he can get along with the locals very welly , although he can find the well pay job on urban but he still choose to work with us with the faith of develop the community. We are glad that we can work with the talent in agricultural community, because we forecast the future of the organic agricultural are very brightly. We are now the tools of help out the talent to grow up and work together with Mr Zheng' s community, maybe one day they can help out the others community who need to develop the organic agricultural. Those are the reason why we need the talents.
The last point is about combination of town and country, we knew not everyone want to spent their rest of the life on rural and being a framer. But one day, as I remember it was 04-05-2007, I got a chance to given the speech by Premier Wen Jiabao in China Agricultural University. In the talk, he mentioned that every professional in different category should contribute on agriculture, farmer and rural area. I am strongly agree with it till now, we hope that we can build up the 'apartments of Urban and Rural integration' in Hong Kong. Our team visited some design school or college, we gave the concept of where the clothes come from. We told them the framer is the one who start it first. We also told them, they are using the cotton which is the hard work by farmers, so they should design the suitable fabric to fit in the market by their talent.
Just do some record about I mentioned about the land healing with cooperation, build up the Experimental farm, this kind of mode is going to improve recently, the next steps of us is about organize a tour to visit the community see what is the circumstances of it with the teachers, students and the fashion brand manager. At the end i want to say thank you to Mr Zheng, because he provided us the chance to make the dream came true and I want to say thank you to the youngsters who help out the community with so much efforts, you guys help us a lots. Also I want to say thank you to my mecilla's crew, because of you we can stand out till now stably. To sum up there are land healing, fine talent, rural and urban integration with culture combine. Hope we can last forever, Thank you!