Explained: Why G20 Should Act and React on Digital Agriculture? || ABC Live

Digital agriculture is the seamless integration of digital technologies into crop and livestock management and other processes in agriculture. For farmers, digital agriculture offers the opportunity to increase production, save costs in the long-term and eliminate risk.

Chandigarh (ABC Live): In year 2022, the presidency of G20, a group of world's largest economies, including both industrialised and developing nations was handed to India.

ABC Research team is keeping close watch on all events of India’s G20 Presidency will publish a research report after New Delhi G20 summit 2023.

It is pertinent to described here that 1st Agriculture Working Group Meeting under India’s G20 Presidency is all set to be organized in Indore from 13/02/2023 to 15/02/2023, wherein working group will discuss on what role G20 has to play in global food and nutrition security, as well as sustainable agricultural production.

The countries that make up the G20 account for around 60 percent of the world's agricultural land, some 80 percent of global agricultural trade, and about two-thirds of global population. As such, these countries have an important role to play in global food and nutrition security, as well as sustainable agricultural production.

Before reporting on India’s G20 Presidency of G20, ABC Team working on India’s G20 Presidency refers a policy paper published by of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in year 2019 titled digital technologies in agriculture and rural areas for our readers with sole aim to make them understand the G20’s action plan on future of agriculture sector.

What is Digital Agriculture?

The above said policy paper says as under:

The agriculture and food sector is facing multiple challenges. With the global population projected to grow from 7.6 billion in 2018 to over 9.6 billion in 2050 there will be a significant increase in the demand for food. At the same time, the availability of natural resources such as fresh water and productive arable land is becoming increasingly constrained.

Production is not the only concern; although agricultural output is currently enough to feed the world, 821 million people still suffer from hunger. Processes such as the rapid rate of urbanization are also having important implications for patterns of food production and consumption.

The agrifood sector remains critical for livelihoods and employment. There are more than 570 million smallholder farms worldwide and agriculture and food production accounts for 28% of the entire global workforce.

Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal of a ‘world with zero hunger’ by 2030 will require more productive, efficient, sustainable, inclusive, transparent and resilient food systems. This will require an urgent transformation of the current agrifood system.

Digital innovations and technologies may be part of the solution. The so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (Industry 4.0) is seeing several sectors rapidly transformed by ‘disruptive’ digital technologies such as Blockchain, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Immerse Reality. In the agriculture and food sector, the spread of mobile technologies, remote-sensing services and distributed computing are already improving smallholders’ access to information, inputs, market, finance and training. Digital technologies are creating new opportunities to integrate smallholders in a digitally- driven agrifood system.

For reading complete policy paper published by FAO click here

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