Digital agriculture can drive the transformation of agri-food systems necessary to eliminate hunger, reduce poverty and build a better future for all humankind, QU Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said on May 18. Photo=Participants at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum 2021.
"Digitalization is the way of the new life and the new economy," he said at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum 2021. "This is both a tremendous responsibility and an unprecedented opportunity for all of us."
ICTs for Inclusive, Resilient and Sustainable Societies and Economies is the theme of this year's Forum, organized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). It has been chaired by Maxim Parshin, Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, and has drawn more than 11, 000 participants from 80 countries in a series of virtual events over recent months. Speakers at today's event, marking the Forum's final proceedings, were ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao and heads, deputies and senior officers from other UN agencies including UNESCO, UNIDO, UNDP and UNCTAD.
Participants acknowledged the damage and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and how digital technologies played an important role in the response. They emphasized that the world will not return to business as usual when the pandemic ends and warned of a digital divide as half the people in the world are not connected to tools that are now playing a bigger role in people's everyday lives.
What FAO is doing
Nowhere are the digital gaps persisting across countries and communities more apparent than in agriculture, FAO's Director-General said, noting that agriculture is becoming more data-driven and data-intensive, which can improve efficiency and reduce negative environmental impacts.
ICTs can help the sector meet the growing need for safe and nutritious food, better manage natural resources, contribute to high-quality productivity growth and also to ensure inclusion and contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, he added.
"Our action needs to be collective and holistic in harnessing science, technology and innovation," Qu said.
FAO has also actively deployed programmes to spread access to ICT's potential for smallholder farmers and other participants in agri-food systems.
The e-Agriculture Community of Practice, for instance, is a knowledge-sharing platform with 18,700 members from more than 190 countries.
Promoting rural e-commerce "accelerates the transformation of mobile phones into new agricultural tools to ‘reach the last mile', helping small-scale and family farmers to benefit from economic and technological development," the Director-General noted.
(IRuniverse)
