We, members of civil society organisations of Asia and the Pacific, support technologies and innovations that promote and protect the rights of small-scale farmers as active and sovereign actors in deciding and using technologies by themselves. Technologies must be made accessible, affordable, and ecologically sound and must respond to the needs and harness the capacities of small-scale farmers. We reject any top-down approach in introducing technologies that consider farmers as passive recipients and consumers. Small-scale farmers should have access to and control over in developing and adopting technologies throughout the agriculture value chain. The indigenous and traditional knowledge system developed and practised by small scale producers should be explicitly included and prioritized in the framework of defining innovations in agriculture.

We demand the recognition, protection and promotion of farmer’s innovations based on traditional and indigenous knowledge harnessing endogenous capacities and responding to local needs and situations, as enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.  We also advance the following demands:

·       Establish farmers’ control over digital technology platforms to ensure farmer’s access, control and rights over seeds and breeds resulting from digitalization of agricultural genetic resources, prevent the monopolization of technology and promote effective partnership of public-private-farmers in accordance with SDGs partnership framework.

·       Agroecology should provide the framework for innovations which should
be protected, promoted, enabled and supported by public policies, financing and
responsible investments to ensure sustained and equitable development and continuous evolution of agroecological innovations and practices developed by small-scale farmers.

·       FAO should support documentation of farmers’ innovations, respect
the intellectual contributions of farmers over millennia and their free
and prior informed consent on utilization of farmers’ knowledge systems, and promote farmer-friendly and locally-appropriate systems for verification and certification of farmers’ products made available in digital platforms

·       Gender gap in access and control over technologies should be addressed by protecting the specific needs of women in obtaining access to and applying  appropriate digital technologies in the value chain (from production, harvesting, processing, marketing to financing)

·       Farmers should be capacitated and sensitized in responding to their needs and in addressing threats and adverse consequences of application of digital technologies in agriculture particularly the impacts on farmers’ rights, the environment, biodiversity, genetic resources and the climate

We are concerned about the overblown importance attributed to digital technologies in the agricultural value chain during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. While the segment of population that can afford and have access to digital technologies were able to benefit from the potentials of these technologies, an overwhelming majority of small-scale farmers in particular and rural population in general across Asia-Pacific have no access to digital technologies nor to basic infrastructures and capacities required to use these technologies.  As countries aspire to pole vault the digital divide, we demand that resources and policies should prioritize support for empowerment of small-scale farmers that harness their capacities and knowledge systems. As highlighted in many country experiences during the pandemic, governments should enable and promote shorter supply chains that allow farmers to directly access markets and establish closer link to consumers, and should allocate resources for direct procurement of farmers’ produce to be supplied to domestic markets.