Presented by Gerard SylvesterKnowledge & Information Management Officer, FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific at #UNOSDKM

Reflections on state of practices and challenges from the e-Agriculture Community

Climate Smart Agriculturepowered by ICT

www.e-agriculture.org

Presentation under CC License. FM-MR

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)

WSIS Plan of Action – November 2005 – Tunis

Action Line (C.7/21): ICT Applications: e-Agriculture

FAO was assigned lead responsibility for facilitating follow up on e-Agriculture (Feb. 2006)

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e-Agriculture

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These founding partners continue to support the Community by providing subject matter experts, meeting venues, content and other resources.

Founding Partners

BACKGROUND

E-discussion- How ICT can support climate-smart agriculture

Experts + hundreds participants identified success and challenges

A global community - >10 000 individuals

collaborating to improve the use of ICT in the agricultural sector.

- Facilitated by FAO and supported by other dev. org.

ICT in Agriculture Sourcebook- Published by World Bank (2011)

To initiate further and better investment in this sector cred

it: W

orld

Ban

k

credit: FAO

Synthesis from the forum on ICT and Agriculture in the Context of Green

Growth

www.e-agriculture.org

IMPROVE planning and consensus building for land and water use

Support adaptation and resilience

Informs land reform/agrarian reform

credit: FAO (F.Martin)

Improves information flows

“ICT has created unprecedented linkages between public and private institutions, governments, citizens and corporations.”

Ndubuisi Ekekwe, African Institution of Technologycredit: FAO

Credit: TELEFONICA

credit: ICRISAT

Engages communities (social inclusion)

Credit: IAEA

SUPPORTenvironmentally sustainable farming

Reduces negative environmental impact of inputs

Optimizes water management

Reduces production related costs

“An initiative by the Government of Turkey that provided higher granular-ity of weather and pest information resulted in a dramatic reduction in farming costs and in some cases a 50% reduction in pesticide use.” ICT in Agriculture Sourcebook

ENHANCEenvironmental and agricultural innovations

Enables real-time communications to/from farmers

Realizes “big-data” in the agricultural sector

Facilitates hyper-local information flows

Photo credit: RMLPhoto credit: FAO

Photo credit: FAO/IAEA

REDUCESrisk and adverse effects

Identifies counterfeit crop production products

Mitigates through micro-insurance

Encourages more investment in the sector

Uganda pilot authenticates input products using scratch-cards and text messages (SMS)

Photo credit: FAO

CHALLENGES

Analysis, specially complex climate data

Availability of hyper-local data

Local capacity to access and act upon information

Incentives for producers to participatein information flows

Cost – related to both service/analysis and telecom policies

Photo credit: FAO

For more on

and Climate Smart Agriculture:

THANK YOU

www.e-agriculture.org

The ICT in Agriculture Sourcebook: www.ictinagriculture.org