Six fascinating talks exploring digital technology, agriculture and social change

Photo credit: Bonney et al., 2014

The digital transformation of agriculture and other sectors has been occurring for a while now but there is much potential still to be discovered. These video resources not only discuss new ways digital technology can be harnessed but the challenges we face in utilising Information and Communications Technology for broader social change.

 

1. Food Tank Webinar Series: Digital Agriculture with David Bergvinson

Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, talks to Dr. Bergvinson on creating equitable opportunities for smallholder farmers to realize their full potential by utilising digital technology (mobile, cloud computing, social media, and big data analytics) along the agriculture value chain.

2. TEDx: How can Digital Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People

Jim Ethington, technologist and entrepreneur with 15 years of experience building data analytics and machine learning products, discusses how the use of big data can help solve world hunger problems. For the last 6 years, Jim has been focused on the problem of how we can apply data science to farming. As the VP of Product at The Climate Corporation, he leads product design and development for a suite of products that provide insights and recommendations to farmers that help them to grow crops more efficiently and effectively.

3. TEDx: Why digital transformation has little to do with technology!

Tobias Burkhardt, founder of the SHIFTSCHOOL for digital transformation, talks about our fears over an increasingly digital future. Exponential computing power and intelligent algorithms drive human productivity into another dimension and new technologies disrupt long established business models before lunch. He explores why only a small digital elite sees the potential while the majority of people are either afraid, ignorant or overconfident when it comes to a digital future. He explains that the answer is deeply routed in our middle class intellectual way of thinking of how to educate our children and how to live a successful life. It is not the technology but our mindsets that threaten our future wellbeing.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Big Data and development: Upsides, downsides and a lot of questions, Duncan Green, Oxfam

Cash Crops With Dividends: Financiers Transforming Strawberries Into Securities, The New York Times

Video: ‘Journey of a gene’ illustrates science of genetic engineering for consumers, Genetic Literacy Project

Why NGOs can’t be trusted on GMOs, The Guardian

The Guardian, Marc Gunther and some NGOs can’t be trusted on GMOs, Political Concern

International Food Security Assessment, 2014-24, USDA

On Trial: Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa, Chatham House

Could businesses do for aid what Amazon did for retail?, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Missing Food, APPG on Agriculture and Food for Development

The Potential Impacts of Mandatory Labeling for Genetically Engineered Food in the United States, CAST

‘Peak soil’ threatens future global food security, Reuters

14 agricultural infographics – The rise and rise of the infographic part two

Last year we posted a blog article about the role of infographics in communicating policy and advocacy messages in a simple, accessible and powerful way. The trend for the infographic to present big data and hard hitting facts to the masses is still growing and here are some more infographics we think you should take a look at:

1. Oxfam Australia in their infographic, What’s wrong with our food system, look at why so many farmers are hungry.
2. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center documents Advances in global agriculture.
3. Public Health Degree investigate the Two sides of the global food crisis.

4. Online Schools compare Oil fields with corn fields in terms of their productivity and greenhouse gas emissions.
5. The United States Agency for International Development’s infographic, The global state of agriculture, looks ahead to how we must increase food for a growing population.
6. The International Food Policy Research Institute document how conservation agriculture works in Farming for the long haul.
7. Monsanto explores The role of data science in agriculture.
8. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, through their FAOSTAT database, explores Our food and agriculture in numbers. The FAO have also created Genetic resources and biodiversity for food and agriculture.
9. Raconteur presents the facts on Sustainable agriculture.
10. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have created several infographics entitled Simple innovations help African farmers thrive, Growing rice for a hungry world and Making progress on the MDGs.
11. Float Mobile Learning examines how Mobile technologies in North American agriculture have developed and progressed.
12. GSMA M-Agri have published an infographic on the Agricultural productivity gap and the opportunity for mobile.
13. ONE’s, A growing opportunity: Measuring investments in African agriculture, investigates whether promises by governments and donors have been kept.
14. The International Food Policy Research Institute look at Meat: the good, the bad and the complicated.

 

Big data: big hope or big risk?

Hailed as the latest technological advance that could revolutionise development and agriculture (along with other sectors), “big data” has been the focus of several recent articles, most notably a series of articles published by SciDev.Net. In June 2013 a UN High level panel called for a “data revolution” emphasising the need for better data to track progress towards development goals. But what is big data and how can it aid poverty and hunger eradication?

Big data is not just large amounts of information but rather it’s about integrating infrastructure to collect data at every step of the development process and designing new data collection methods that can track development goals effectively. In particular, big data is being hailed as the big fix for the lack of reliable official statistics in developing countries. But there is no clear (agreed upon) definition of big data, one article stating “it is data generated through our increasing use of digital devices and web-supported tools and platforms in our daily lives”. Due to our increasingly digital society, the amount of data (from social media platforms, mobile phones, online financial services etc.) has grown enormously. A much quoted statistic states that up to 90% of the world’s data was created over just two years (2010–2012). The aim for big data is to use this sizeable knowledge source to add value to society. Driving interest in evidence-based policy making, big data is also being termed a movement, one that aims to turn data into decision making.

In May 2012 Global Pulse published a White Paper entitled Big Data for Development: Opportunities & Challenges, which highlighted the opportunities big data provides. In particular they explore the role of big data in describing what is happening, predicting what may happen and explore the reasons behind why things happen.

For agriculture, big data means information can be collected along the whole supply chain including from supermarkets, weather sensing equipment, digital images, and research papers. These data sets can then be transformed through analytics into actionable information. But this conversion is rife with complexities in terms of managing, processing, sharing and using huge amounts of data.

2013 Global Hunger Index

On the 14^th October 2013, the latest Global Hunger Index report was launched. Produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Welhungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, this annual report details the progress the world has made in tackling hunger. The index itself is “a multidimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger” that combines measures of child underweight, child mortality and undernourishment (discussed in chapter 2 of One Billion Hungry). This year’s figures reflect hunger during the period 2008-2012 and show global hunger has fallen by a third since 1990.

While the world has made some progress in reducing hunger since 1990, we still have far to go. Global hunger remains “serious,” and 19 countries suffer from levels of hunger that are either “alarming” or “extremely alarming.” 23 countries, however, have reduced their GHI scores by 50% or more. The top ten so-called success countries in terms of improvements in GHI scores since 1990 were Angola, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Niger, Rwanda, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Sub-saharan Africa has one of the highest GHIs per region along with South Asia but since 2000, an increase in political stability and the achievements made in tackling HIV/AIDS, malaria and childhood diseases have seen SSA starting to make considerable progress towards reducing hunger.

There are a number of big data reports that come out annually around this time of year not least the Global Hunger Index and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s State of Food Insecurity in the World. The merit of these analyses lie in tracking progress and raising awareness but their data cannot be taken as a true reflection of what’s happening on the ground, merely an indicator of the global situation. That is not to say that there isn’t value in such data. McKinsey states that so-called big data has been exploding in recent years and highlights its use in uncovering emerging trends and future issues. Indicators such as the GHI have the power to inform if delivered at the levels at which key decisions are made but also potentially predict how hunger and its causes might change in the future.

This year the Global Hunger Index report talks about one key area that looks set to become more important as we continue to face growing global threats such as climate change and that is resilience. The report outlines how we must coordinate activities across the development and international aid sectors to help the most vulnerable better prepare and adapt to oncoming shocks and crises.