Shanghai, China — The Center for International Trade Expositions and Mission (CITEM) brings 40 Filipino food manufacturers and specialty companies to the China International Import Expo (CIIE) at the National Exhibition Center on 5 November 2021.

The exhibition welcomes various import-export sectors including Food and Agricultural Products, Automobile, Intelligent Industry & Information Technology, Consumer Goods, Medical Equipment & Healthcare Products, and Trade in Services. This fourth edition of the event has brought in 3,000 offline exhibitors from 127 countries. The Philippines will be represented under the FOODPhilippines banner, which is CITEM’s signature brand for Filipino food promotions in the international market. In order to maximize the country’s participation, the FOODPhilippines pavilion will feature multiple food categories including frozen and processed seafood products, frozen and processed fruits, beverages, baked goods and snacks, and condiments.

“China is our top export market holding 27% of the Philippines’ total exports. CIIE is a great opportunity to feature how Filipino products can meet the needs of the Chinese market and also explore other opportunities to further develop economic relations with China,” shares CITEM’s Executive Director, Pauline Suaco-Juan.

Initiated by the Chinese government in 2018, CIIE stands as China’s premier national-level import-themed trade exhibition. In last year’s participation, CITEM reported USD6.17-M worth of onsite booked sales and USD455.689 -M worth of export commitments as a result of the country’s participation.

The country’s pavilion will house 40 Filipino companies namely: AG Grays Farm, Agrinurture Inc., Avante Agri-Products Philippines Inc., B&C Healthy Snack Foods Inc, Castillo Import Export Ventures Inc, Century International (China) Co., CJ Uniworld Corp., Century Pacific Agricultural Ventures Inc., DOLE Asia Holdings Pte Ltd, DOLE Packaged Foods (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Eau de Coco, Eng Seng Food Products, Excellent Quality Goods Supply Co., Fisher Farms, Gerb Golden Hands Trading, Good Sense Food & Juices Corporation, Hancole Corporation, Hijo Resources Corporation, Innovative Packaging, Island Fun Inc, Jegen S.W.E. Enterprises, JNRM Corporation, Jugard Foods Co. Ltd., M. Lhuillier Food Products, Magic Melt Foods Corp, Marigold Manufacturing Corporation, Monde Nissin, Nutri Asia, Oleofats Incorporated, Orich International Traders Inc, Raspina Tropical Fruits Inc, Republic Biscuit Corporation, S&W Fine Foods, See’s International Food Manufacturing Corp., Sunnjef Plantation Inc, Tanduay Distillers Inc, Team Asia Corporation, Uni Steady, Vegetari Vegetarian Products, and Weambard International Technology Inc.

This year is the second time the Philippines will be exploring the hybrid format in CIIE, where the physical exhibition will be complemented with digital components. The FOODPhilippines pavilion will feature QR codes on the product display so interested buyers can explore more about the products and the companies. Digital lookbooks will also be distributed to participants and will be available for download. Given travel restrictions, Philippine-based exhibitors and foreign buyers will have opportunities to connect through online B2B meetings facilitated by CITEM, along with its partner agencies and business support organizations. Specific for this event and the Chinese market, CITEM has also launched FOODPhilippines China Portal (https://foodphilippines.cn/ciie2021/), which is an information platform where potential buyers from China can explore the different exhibitors of CIIE and request B2B meetings. As an added value to exhibitors, CITEM has also enhanced its presence on China’s social media platforms — Weibo and WeChat, where the agency promotes Filipino products and services to a broader Chinese demographic. For year round access to more exhibitors, CITEM launched IFEXConnect (www.ifexconnect.com) last 23 September 2021 which makes thousands of Filipino export goods more discoverable and accessible to a global audience.

The FOODPhilippines participation in CIIE 2021 is organized in partnership with the Foreign Trade Services Corps (FTSC) through the Philippine Trade & Investment Centers (PTICs) in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong and the Export Marketing Bureau (EMB). Government partners are the Department of Agriculture (DA) through the Office of the Agricultural Counsellor in Beijing (DA-OAC- Beijing) and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). The project is likewise supported by business associations such as the Philippine Exporters Confederation, Inc. (PHILEXPORT) and the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce & Industry, Inc. (FFCCCII). ♦

The 2021 Hybrid National Food Fair successfully completed its year-long program to assist Filipino MSMEs engaged in the food industry with a physical event held at the Festival Mall in Alabang, last 15-24 October 2021. This face-to-face selling event is part of the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) initiatives to support the reopening of the economy.

In a simple program last 20 October 2021, DTI Secretary Ramon M. Lopez noted in his keynote address, delivered by Usec. Blesila Lantayona of the Regional Operations Group (ROG), that: “The food industry has proven to be one of the most dynamic and resurgent through these past 18 months. The ability of food entrepreneurs to quickly pivot to the online marketplace and provide a valuable service to their communities is nothing short of heroic.”

Sixty-four (64) MSMEs participated in the physical component of the National Food Fair. A PINASarap Food Hub showcased the products of participating exhibitors along with a QR Code that provides information about their company name and booth location. At the same time, MSMEs who could not be physically present at the event venue were also featured in the virtual hub with their QR Codes linking to their online store and Facebook business page.

The 10-day physical event of the 2021 Hybrid National Food Fair generated some PHP13.6-million in revenues for the participating exhibitors. Some of the best-selling products were banana chips, virgin coconut oil and other coconut-based products, fresh seafoods, healthy lemon grass drink, and kitchen decors and handicrafts. The top performing exhibitors were: Bahaghari Global Food, Inc., Gold in Grass, CocoPlus Development Corporation, Cerra Furniture and Home Décor, and Gloria’s Delicacies.

In his inspirational message, Usec. Abdulgani M. Macatoman of the DTI-Trade Promotions Group summarized the year-long program of the 2021 Hybrid National Food Fair, which included online webinars to facilitate the digital transformation of MSMEs, online food fairs in partnership with e-commerce platforms Shopee and Lazada as well as farm-to-table website mayani.ph, and the National Food Fair Digital Mall on UnionBank GlobalLinker.

“Through the year-long activities under the 2021 Hybrid National Food Fair, we hope that we have fulfilled our mission to broaden the exposure of our food entrepreneurs and introduce their products not just domestically, but possibly even beyond our borders to reach customers abroad,” concludes Usec. Macatoman.

The 2021 Hybrid National Food Fair was organized by the DTI-Bureau of Domestic Trade Promotion in collaboration with the DTI-Regional Operations Group. Through the National Food Fair Digital Mall, foodies can continue to enjoy the regional delicacies and other culinary products by shopping online on https://nff.linker.store.

For more information, please follow the social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You may also email Director Marievic M. Bonoan at bdtp@dti.gov.ph. 

In the 20 months since the COVID-19 pandemic began, technological innovations have gone from futuristic to familiar. These days it’s hard to be out in the world without encountering QR-coded menus or supplying digital vaccine passports.

As the tourism industry—which logged a billion fewer international arrivals in 2020 than 2019—sputters back to life, masks may begin to disappear, but many pandemic-era tech tools will continue to factor into your trips.

“Consumers will come to expect technologies that make them more confident about travel,” says Steve Shur, the president of the Travel Technology Association. “Some of these changes are here to stay.”

In fact, a 2021 Pew Research survey of 915 policy leaders, science researchers, and other experts predicts that, by 2025, our daily lives could be even more influenced by algorithms, remote work, and what some call “tele-everything.”

While novel interventions such as real-time translation devices and facial recognition passport control may make travel safer and more efficient, there are downsides, including concerns about privacy, data security, and biased technology. Here are some of the innovations that travelers will continue to see and use.

Virtual and augmented reality

When the pandemic shut down travel, museums and tourist destinations turned to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to create online exhibits and experiences. While some of these experiences are best seen with a VR headset, most can be enjoyed with just a computer or smartphone.

The Xplore Petra app launched in June 2020, allowing users to “visit” Jordan’s most iconic archaeological site by projecting a scaled-down version of the ruins. Lights over Lapland, an Arctic travel company, launched a VR experience to show off the Northern Lights using VR headsets or computer screens.

Post-pandemic, VR and AR may enhance actual trips by adding experiences such as a simulated climb up the Matterhorn at Lucerne’s Swiss Museum of Transport. The Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland, has a VR attraction in which visitors immerse themselves in “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a 500-year-old painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

The Museum of Natural History in Paris has an AR exhibit that brings visitors face to face with extinct animals in digital form. The National Museum of Singapore has an installation called “Story of the Forest,” where sightseers explore a virtual landscape comprised of almost 70 nature drawings from the museum collection. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., has an app that uses AR to show what some of its animal skeletons would look like with skin and muscle over the bones, offering a new view of a collection dating back to the 1880s.

“VR is not going to replace travel and tourism. It is just going to enhance tourism,” says Anu Pillai, who runs the Digital Center of Excellence at Wipro, a technology company.

Crowd control

To help enforce social distancing, cities, airports, and museums tested or rolled out crowd-control technology including Singapore’s roaming, vaguely terrifying robots that announce people are too close together and signs indicating how large crowds are at airport gates. As throngs of travelers return to popular destinations, similar methods and devices may be implemented to prevent overtourism.

In Italy during the pandemic, Venice began tracking visitors using cameras designed to catch criminals. Post-pandemic, it plans to harness them to keep tourist numbers at manageable levels, perhaps in concert with the mayor’s proposal to add electronic gates at major entry points (cruise ship docks, train stations) that can be closed if the city gets overcrowded.

“We know minute by minute how many people are passing and where they are going,” Simone Venturini, Venice’s top tourism official, told the New York Times. “We have total control of the city.”

Amsterdam, which also struggles with overtourism, tracks how visitors use Amsterdam’s City Card, a flat-fee pass to museums and public transport. Beach Check UK launched this summer with real-time information on how busy dozens of beaches are along the English coast, guiding travelers away from packed areas.

“Technology can be used to collect data in order to both make better decisions and communicate those decisions,” says Christopher Imbsen, director of sustainability at World Travel & Tourism Council.

UV-C cleaning

Hospitals have used UV-C light to disinfect and kill viruses for more than two decades. Now, indoor public spaces including airports, gyms, and movie theaters are adding UV-C to halt viral spread.

“UV-C is having its heyday right now,” says Peter Veloz, CEO of UltraViolet Devices, which makes UV disinfecting technology.

UV-C has germicidal properties that combat COVID-19 and other nasties, both in the air or on surfaces. Depending on the location, new UV-C installations go into HVACs, on escalator handrails, or through airports and planes via light-equipped robots that disinfect as they go.

If installed and operated correctly, a UV-C system can kill all sorts of bacteria and germs. Even seasonal flu bugs might be zapped before they spread. “COVID-19 could come and go, but what won't disappear are normal pathogens,” Veloz says.

QR codes at restaurants

In the early days of the pandemic, when transmission of the COVID-19 wasn’t yet well understood, restaurants hurried to provide QR codes. The little black boxes of pixelated dots and dashes could be scanned with a smart phone to bring up a menu, let you order from it, and then allow you to pay your bill, all with limited virus-spreading interactions with servers.

While earlier fears that people could catch the virus via menus and other surfaces have been disproven, the codes have proven convenient and will probably stick around, especially with late-pandemic worker shortages.

Such convenience might mean a trade off with privacy, however, since the little codes can potentially gather a large amount of information from users. Some QR programs just take a food order, but others mine data like a patron’s dining history, age, and gender. The restaurant could use that info to send them coupons or event invitations—or sell it to third parties.

“It’s an example of companies exploiting COVID-19 to extend tracking,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “Moving everything to mobile opens people to new ways of tracking and control.”

Travelers should know that QR codes can be hacked; you might scan one, place a dinner order, and wind up compromising your credit card instead. Stanley recommends treating QR codes just as you do links in unknown emails. Either use your phone to look up the restaurant’s menu on the internet or install a protective app like Kaspersky QR Scanner, which will give users a warning if the code isn’t safe.

Contact-tracing tools

Public health groups used contact tracing methods to identify and track down people who were potentially exposed to infectious diseases such as Zika and HIV, and offer counseling, screening, and treatment. These traditional tools were usually based on phone calls to ask individuals about who they were in contact with and to continue researching exposure. The pandemic pushed officials to scale up such efforts and implement new, higher-tech ones to track viral spread and provide information. 

For instance, Apple and Google added contact-tracing functions to new smartphone software, allowing users to opt in and get alerts if they come into close contact with an infected person.

“There’s been a strong recognition about the value of and the important role of contact tracing for infectious disease prevention and control,” says Elizabeth Ruebush, a senior analyst for infectious disease and immunization policy at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “But we’ve never seen it implemented at the scale of COVID-19.”

Other technologies, such as automated texts, viral heat maps and even CCTV with facial recognition could help track other infectious illnesses or make us ready for the next pandemic.

Even with fancy new apps, however, phone calls and personal outreach will still be at the center of public health. “These tools are aimed to enhance, but not replace, traditional contact tracing,” Ruebush says.

COVID-19 has sped up our adoption of technology. The downside is that this may make it even harder to turn off smartphones while on vacation. Then again, wanderlust is now stronger than ever—and getting lost in the moment still hasn’t been harnessed by a digital code.

One of the most important things in any business is how it is generally regarded by the rest of the world. This includes the customers, of course, but also the general wider public, as well as the partners and competitors in the industry – whatever that industry might be. As it happens, there are a huge number of ways in which businesses can always hope to improve their reputation, and in this article, we are going to go through just a few of the most effective of these in particular. Each of these is worth looking into if you are a business owner yourself.

A physical address does matter 
You’d be amazed at the kind of effect having the right address can have on your business’ reputation. But what counts as a reputable address? Well, it needs to be somewhere that most people regard as trustworthy or otherwise important in the area that you are working within, or the expertise that you have. It also needs to be somewhere that sounds impressive on the page. With the right physical address, everyone is going to think so much more of a business, and this is going to make a huge difference to its ongoing success chances. This is especially important in traditional business settings or if you’re a new company looking to gain some credibility.

Get your branding right
Of course, in order to have a good reputation, branding is very often going to be one of the most important concerns of all, and this is something that is really worth looking into on a regular basis. You’ll find that a good brand is more or less the difference between success and failure most of the time in business, so it really is worth thinking about in detail. To improve branding, make sure it is simple, consistent, and that it makes sense for the business type and services that are offered. This is what really matters all in all.

Be as available as possible
Availability to the public is one of those things that you first learn in business school, and with good reason. The more available a business is in general to people who want to contact it, the more positive the general public’s view of that company will be. There are many ways to make a business more available, from having an open phone line that is looked after well to ensuring that every email is answered promptly. In any case, it’s important to have strong availability at all times, however, that might be achieved.

Create and follow an ethical guideline
These days, it is perhaps more important than ever to be able to display to the public what your ethics are as a business. The more clearly you can do this, the better, as it is going to mean that people are much more likely to appreciate where you’re coming from on the whole. It is particularly important with the millennial and gen Z generations, so if they are your audience you’ll need to make sure you don’t overlook this. Show that you care about people and the planet, and you will do pretty well.

Source: Tech Collective SEA

The volume of data transferred is constantly increasing, but the absolute security of these exchanges cannot be guaranteed, as shown by cases of hacking frequently reported in the news. To counter hacking, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, has developed a new system based on the concept of "zero-knowledge proofs," the security of which is based on the physical principle of relativity: information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Thus, one of the fundamental principles of modern physics allows for secure data transfer. This system allows users to identify themselves in complete confidentiality without disclosing any personal information, promising applications in the field of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. These results can be read in the journal Nature.

Adding new products to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) List of Environmental Goods can boost the region’s responses to calls for climate change adaptation and mitigation, and achievement of environmental sustainability, according to an APEC Policy Support Unit policy brief.

Carlos Kuriyama, a senior analyst with the APEC Policy Support Unit, said that from a trade perspective, a more meaningful contribution in support of green growth requires a more comprehensive range of products.

“APEC economies should explore an expansion of its list of environmental goods, to cover new technologies that could contribute to green growth, but did not exist or had limited applications back in 2012; and encourage APEC economies to consider goods that are cleaner or more environmentally friendly,” he said.

The list is a commitment endorsed by leaders in 2012 to reduce tariff rates of 54 goods to 5 percent or less by the end of 2020 with the intention to improve access to environmental technologies and contribute to green growth and trade liberalization.

It includes solar panels, wind turbines, bamboo flooring, as well as environmental monitoring, analysis and assessment equipment, among others.

Kuriyama said expanding the list could include contemplating a global value chain approach.

“Such an approach would allow adapted goods, which are environmentally friendly or cleaner, and whose use is beneficial for environmental protection or resource management, to be factored in. A global value chain approach would also benefit developing economies, as they could produce some of many components that go into certain environmental products,” he said.

Kuriyama said the current APEC List of Environmental Goods, while serving to improve market access, is not in itself sufficient to support green growth.

Since its endorsement in 2012, the trade of products on the list has grown significantly worldwide and within the APEC region.

Between 2012 and 2019, global and intra-APEC trade in the products on the list increased by 6.4 percent and 7 percent, respectively. In contrast, overall global trade (all products) rose by only 1.9 percent.

APEC’s exports and imports of those 54 products increased by 5.7 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively, between 2012 and 2019.

Kuriyama said tariff reductions, stronger environmental awareness, implementation of environmental policies and regulatory reforms, enforcement of government regulations to protect the environment, progress in developing alternative energy sources and energy-efficient goods, and high international oil prices have motivated the increase of trade in environmental goods.

The policy brief said most APEC economies have been able to implement the commitment under the list to reduce tariffs to 5 percent or less.

It added most non-tariff measures affecting environmental goods are export-related, and these include subsidies, licences and quotas; discriminatory concessional loans and grants to local exporters; and export tax rebates.

Source: PHILEXPORT News and Features