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only payphone.<\/p>\nYou may identify with this\u2026 On one of my first trips to a village in rural India, children would congregate in front of my camera, folks would peer into the few homes that had a television set, and a large line gathered in front of the village\u2019s only payphone.<\/p>\n
In less than a decade, smartphones that pack in-built cameras and social media apps have taken over much of those functions and costs have plummeted. The mobile revolution across Africa and South Asia is well known and accelerated by the pandemic, India now has more rural Internet users than urban.<\/p>\n
But, there remain significant inequities. A recent study in Nature Sustainability<\/a> found more than 75% of farms that were bigger than 200 ha had high-speed, 3G, or 4G connectivity but less than 30% of farmers with less than 1 ha did. Farms with the lowest yields and where farmers face the most climate-related shocks and food insecurity have even less digital connectivity.<\/p>\n Data has the power of connecting the dots to maximize our collective impact. Just like roads and electricity, data can serve as infrastructure to catalyze the next generation of agri-tech innovations.<\/p>\n Asia\u2019s Green Revolution powered increases in rice and wheat yield through agricultural technologies like improved seeds and fertilizers and was most successful in irrigated areas. Digital technologies need to be contextualized to land on similarly fertile soil too.<\/p>\n The so-called developed and developing world divide won\u2019t be closed by technology alone.\u00a0 Physical infrastructure, human capital, political institutions, and finance are necessary foundations for the gains that technology can provide.<\/p>\n We need to go beyond seeing digital technologies as a silver bullet. Don\u2019t get me wrong: the cornucopia of opportunities from artificial intelligence to blockchain to IoT is exciting and is quickly transforming agriculture into a knowledge-driven industry. But, transformative innovation necessarily involves bundling (i) scientific and engineering advances, with(ii) public policies, and (iii) private interventions. The opportunity we have is to align traditional agricultural research, business, and policymakers with the explosion of new agri-tech startups, venture capitalists, and telecom & cloud service providers.<\/p>\n No single organization has authority or control over even a significant part of the agri-food system, much less the whole. Rather, agri-food systems are highly decentralized and are likely to deconcentrate further as countries seek to boost the resilience of their national food security in the post-Covid era.\u00a0 We also need to be wary of the inequities that technology can exacerbate, particularly when powerful interests capture its value & its data for themselves.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what government and the broader agricultural sector now need to do: to flip agri-tech solutions that are developed from the top-down and where data is extracted from farmers today and instead empower farmers to control and share their own data in a unified way on their own terms.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/digitalgreen.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Screen-Shot-2020-12-10-at-10.24.44-PM-298x300.png\")
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