Digital tools have the power to transform agriculture – let’s make sure they reach everyone!
Agriculture is changing, and one of the biggest drivers of this change is technology. Whether through AI-assisted imaging, drone application, blockchain-backed logistics or farmer support apps, emerging digital technologies have the power to increase agricultural output, give farmers better commercial results, and save them time in the field, thereby improving their quality of life.
These tools were addressed in detail at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture’s virtual hemispheric forum on bridging the digital divide, in which my colleague Ronald Guendel moderated the first session. During this round-table debate, participants agreed that, though Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is already a net exporter of agricultural products, it has untapped potential to produce even more and to make better use of what it produces, giving those both within and without its borders a reliable supply of nutritious, sustainable food.
Digital tools, with their wide-ranging benefits, could unlock this potential: making farmers and fields more efficient, protecting us against food loss, reducing inputs and machinery use (and therefore carbon emissions), giving farmers greater access to markets, and making our supply chains more resilient to the kind of crisis we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. That is why we need to do more than just develop these tools: we need to invest in giving every farmer in LAC – and, in fact, the entire world – reliable access to them, so no smallholder will be left behind by the digital revolution.
The world’s connectivity picture is more complicated than it may seem. LAC is characterized as a region that has issues in this regard – but when you look across the region, the situation varies dramatically from place to place and person to person.
For example, there is a wide gap between cities (where 71% of the population has good connectivity) and the countryside (where the figure is just 36.8%) – a particularly worrying statistic for the agricultural industry. We also know that there is a gender gap: women are less likely to own a mobile phone than men, even after normalizing for other factors. In general, characteristics likely to correlate with a lack of connectivity include being a woman, living in rural areas, having a low level of education, and being older than 45.
In other words, there is a ‘digital divide’ that sits on top of existing economic inequality. This is bad news not just for the farmers affected, but also for every consumer, because the divide prevents food from entering the value chain, meaning supply is more restricted – and the price of food higher – than it needs to be.
Imagine one smallholder who can communicate with his customers digitally, via web chat or a dedicated app, and one who has no connectivity and cannot. In a situation like the lockdowns of 2020, farmers unexpectedly can no longer welcome visitors to their farm. The second farmer would have no reliable way to trade, and risks wasting part of their yield with no one to sell it to. But the first farmer can continue to have dialogues with their partners and arrange the sale of crops. What is more, they are using an app to track their inputs and crop protection regime – thereby fulfilling the traceability requirements for access to the global food value chain.
This is an illustration of how digital tools don’t just have a single impact – they can improve farmers’ prospects in a number of ways, each one compounding the last. And it’s why we cannot afford to let these digital gaps persist or widen – our agricultural and social development depends on closing them.
The IICA session finished by inviting collaboration across Latin America to help smallholder farmers get connected, through a mixture of public-private partnerships, local community schemes, and international co-operative frameworks. Here, I would like to extend the same invitation on a global basis. To drive economic growth – along with social equality and increased agricultural output – we need to drive the technological basis for that growth. And we need to place smallholders at the center of this process, empowering them with the tools to connect to experts, implement sustainable practices, and share their insight on a common platform with other producers.
The good news is: the tools to do all this already exist. We just need to make sure they are accessible to everyone, with not a single farmer left out.