The Netherlands and China will monitor trade in agricultural products more simple. This was said on 10 May 2011 by Dutch Minister Verhagen of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation and his Chinese colleague Zhi Shuping, Minister of the new Food and Consumer products authorities. From now on China and the Netherlands will monitoring the import and export data of agricultural products digitally in advance. According to Minister Verhagen this will make doing business with China more attractive, because there is less paper work to fill out. He also adds that digital monitoring is more accurate and faster, so the administrative work will also become less for entrepreneurs.

Still to prevent from happening that Dutch companies cannot do business anymore with Chinese companies, who wants to have physical papers, export certificates will still be available in physical shape for now. When the Chinese seaports are used to handle the papers digitally, the physical paper shape will also disappear.

Next to this, it has been also calculated by the Dutch Science Board for Government policy ( WRR) that monitoring trade digitally the private sector can save around 5% of its size in trade in transaction cost. For the agricultural sector this means around € 400 million can be saved.

Source: Rijksoverheid, 10 May 2011