Agriculture, The Victim, and A Culprit - Notes for 50th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum

50th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, under the theme Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World, will seek to engage public and private actors in supporting global, regional and national initiatives that generate positive impact for all stakeholders. The Forum, within this framework, will focus on four key issues: climate change and ecosystems loss, sustainable and inclusive business models, governing technology and its impacts, and adaptation to demographic, social and technological trends.

Davos 2020: It’s Different

What makes this meeting different from all previous versions is not just that this is the 50th such meeting since the pioneer and visionary Karl Schwab started the World Economic Forum, but also the fact that today's world needs focused effort by all stakeholders more than ever.

A few days back World Economic Forum released The Global Risk Report 2020 which identified top risks we face today not just as a society but as the human race. The report enumerates top global risks faced in terms of likelihood as extreme weather, climate action failure, natural disaster, biodiversity loss, human-made natural disasters. Never in the past fifteen reports, the top five global risks revolve around how we have negatively impacted the place we call our home, Earth.

Agriculture: Common thread connecting Top Risks

If we evaluate all these five top risks, they revolve around agriculture or agriculture and food is a key factor related to these risks.

Extreme weather is the immediate outcome of climate change which is caused by various factors including unsustainable consumption and the way we achieved food security of the world, now the same extreme weather is threatening the production of food and hence threatening food security.

Climate action failure has a critical action point unfulfilled so far as well as not much is visibly done in form of deforestation due to agriculture, abuse of water resources by agricultural activities and burning of agriculture waste.

Natural disasters are happening far more frequently than in past, this is also catalyzed by encroachment of forests, water bodies and overexposure of fragile ecosystem by agriculture.

Biodiversity loss is a risk which is aggravated by reducing the number of local and regional crop varieties on one hand and overuse of agriculture chemicals that directly impact both flora and fauna of an ecosystem.

Last but not least human-made natural disasters are the direct outcome of polluting soil, water, and air, which also has unsustainable agriculture as a well-documented culprit.

High Time: We need to start action Now

The risks are staring us in the face, the need of the hour is to tackle them on an immediate basis or our next generation will ask us questions which we will not be able to answer. The solutions exist but we need to start acting now to implement them.

First things first we need to ensure that the agriculture becomes sustainable. Which means that we need to ensure that we minimize the food loss. Today more than one-third of food grown is lost due to inefficiencies and by deploying correct technology and business models this problem can be tackled.

Second, we need to make agriculture climate-resilient. It is about mapping the right crop with right agri-climatic zone and local demand. This will ensure we make food reach from farms to fork in the shortest possible time at the same time ensuring that impact of climate change on food security can be mitigated by growing right crops using the right methods and tools.

Third, we must ensure that agriculture is incentivized for being sustainable. Abuse of the scarce resource “water” by growing water-guzzling crops and using archaic practices need to stop now. Also, the flawed policies which lead to overconsumption of inputs (water, fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, and labor) required for agriculture need to be tweaked. What good is free/subsidized electricity to farmers if it leads to abuse of groundwater, or subsidy on fertilizers if lead to decay and acidification of soil.

Fourth, we need to create global collaborative platforms for cross border sharing of information on agriculture and value chains. Food is not just a commodity but can be one of the biggest reason for world order to collapse. We need sustained efforts from all stakeholders to create transparent food system so that the whole world sees the problem as one and try to solve it as one.

Last but not least we need to look at agriculture as not just food grown in farms but look at innovations in the form of urban farms, agriculture forestry, and cyclical agriculture ecosystems.

Technology Transformation: Scalable intervention for Good

In order to make agriculture sustainable over the next couple of decades, a lot needs to be done. To achieve the same three technologies are crucial and will have a huge impact on the way we grow and consume our food.

The first step for more efficient and sustainable food system is that it needs to be Fast, Fair and Flexible. Blockchain is one such technology which can achieve complex task of tracing complete food value chain and contextual activities around it.

The second step would be to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based prescriptive analytics for reducing the usage of agriculture input on one hand and increase the nutritional value of food on the other.

The third step would be to use Geo-Spatial technologies in collaboration with on-ground sensors for monitoring, collection, and analysis of datasets related to agriculture.

I hope and wish we have great discussions at Davos 2020 and work out a concrete way forward to make our world a more equitable place to live.

About the Author

Deepak is a well-decorated serial technopreneur with interest and expertise in the application of technologies including Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Geo-Spatial Technology, Computer Vision, Mobile Technology, Drones and Internet of Things in Agriculture. He was honored as Technology Pioneer by World Economic Forum.