E-Agriculture

What case studies demonstrate the benefits and/or damages of the use of ICTs and Open Data?

What case studies demonstrate the benefits and/or damages of the use of ICTs and Open Data?

What is the potential for open data in nutrition and agriculture? Does open data benefit and damage farmers, especially smallholder family farmers, women and the youth in developing countries? What case studies can demonstrate the benefits and/or damages of the use of ICTs and Open Data?

Thembani Malapela
Thembani MalapelaFood and Agriculture Organization of the United NationsItaly

Dear Participants,

Welcome to the second week of this e-Forum discussion on the ICTs and Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition. We had an interesting 1st week with many participants addressing that week’s question.

For a flash summary, please read this article.

This week’s discussions seeks your comments on the potential of open data; benefits and possible damages to family farmers, women and the youth and if you can also give cases and examples that will be appreciated.

To post simply log in and reply to this thread - support in posting on forums

We wish you a wholesome discussion.

Thembani,On behalf of the e-forum moderators

Lanre Rotimi
Lanre RotimiInternational Society for Poverty Elimination / Economic Alliance GroupNigeria

Dear Moderator, it appears to me that the published Week 1 Summary does not do justice to all good ideas and pertinent suggestions contributed that ought to have been harvesred and proessed first into the Week Summary Report and ultimately into the e-Forum Discussion Outcome Document that includes Conclusions and Recommendations that does effective justice to the speific e-Forum Disussion. It is my hope that Week 2 Summary Report will be more robust and inlusive of all good ideas and pertinent suggestions contributed. 

I applaud your more construtive engagement approach to Week 2 discussions. However, apology to contribute is unnecessary in my view. For greater effectiveness Moderators on each e-Forum disussion need to actively contribute to posts setting out good ideas and pertinent suggestions and ask follow up questions that could enrich the Week's discussions. I do hope that more Moderators and Speakers will join you in this new approach. Well done.  

Thembani Malapela
Thembani MalapelaFood and Agriculture Organization of the United NationsItaly

Thank you for your feedback, 

Please note that the summaries are only to give a hit of whats happening to wet their appertite into commenting on the platform. The full summaries of the discussion are produced later with all the details, 

Regarding engagement in week 1, there was less intervention from us as the debate was more lively and interjecting would have way led the discussion into the moderators preferances. In week 2 we intervened as there were some cases mentioned in passing.

Thank you for the feedback and be sure that all the other moderators are reading this ( also note we had some moderators contributing so everyone had a role)

Regards,

Thembani Malapela, On behalf of Moderators

Thembani Malapela
Thembani MalapelaFood and Agriculture Organization of the United NationsItaly

Thank you for your feedback, 

Please note that the summaries are only to give a hit of whats happening to wet their appertite into commenting on the platform. The full summaries of the discussion are produced later with all the details, 

Regarding engagement in week 1, there was less intervention from us as the debate was more lively and interjecting would have way led the discussion into the moderators preferances. In week 2 we intervened as there were some cases mentioned in passing.

Thank you for the feedback and be sure that all the other moderators are reading this ( also note we had some moderators contributing so everyone had a role)

Regards,

Thembani Malapela, On behalf of Moderators

Chipo Msengezi
Chipo MsengeziCTANetherlands

Dear All

GODAN together with the Open Data Institute published a discussion paper showcasing a series of 14 use cases showing how open data can be useful in different stages of agriculture, food production and consumption.

It does a good job of highlighting three specific ways open data can help solve practical problems in the agriculture and nutrition sectors:

1. Enabling more efficient and effective decision making

2. Fostering innovation that everyone can benefit from

3. Driving organisational and sector change through transparency

You can access the paper here: How can we improve agriculture, food and nutrition with open data?

Vassilis Protonotarios
Vassilis ProtonotariosNEUROPUBLIC S.A.Greece

Dear Chipo,

Thank you for bringing this up. I feel honored to have been among the authors of the specific publication, and indeed the Discussion Paper aims to provide some examples where the use of open data in agriculture and nutrition made an impact. There are different application presented, and of course there are many more that we could not include for various reasons (the total length of the publication being one of them). 

The use of ICT tools facilitated various aspects of the process, ranging from the production and collection/recording of the data, to their management, sharing and exploitation. I find a connection with previous week's topic here: The more adapted the ICT tools are to specific applications, the higher the impact is. THe applications are numerous and I will not focus on any specific one.

What I would like to contribute, as a general message, is that we have all the components out there, such as the open data, the applications and ICT tools, the developers, the SMEs that work on data-powered solutions and of course the expected end users. What we need is to provide the mean for connecting all these different parts and stakeholders so that we will manage to come up with meaningful outcomes for the  end users, providing added value to the open data and the efforts of those working with them. As a final result, ICTs and open data should be used for improving food production and addressing the nutritional needs of the constantly increasing global population.

Alain Nkongnenwi
Alain NkongnenwiResearch for Development internationalCameroon

I think Chipo and Vprot have actually made reseanable points in their contributions moreso the document that Chipo shared there was very helpfull in regards to the open data.

But in as much as we are tryinng to resolve a problem here we shouldn't create another at the end of the day by exposing some data that must not be exposed, so i will say open data can be of great help to e-agriculture if an only if we know the exact problem we are trying to solve and the bases for which we intern to implement the open data in agriculture because if this things are not well difined then we may end up building a "bee nest inside our bedroom".

I thing more light on this has been said by the UK government in their official blog which can be access here especially the point which emphasis on evidence based decition making and the other which talks about the risk involved.

In a summary, it leads us to the point that data in agriculture can be made open but not all of these data can be made open so for e-agriculture, it will work well on  what application and/or software is best for this purpose which will help us better understand the openness of the data requiredand how it should be handled.

 

Regards

Martin Parr
Martin ParrGODAN SecretariatUnited Kingdom

Since the first joint publication with ODI highlighted those case studies we have published two compilation booklets which build on them. They are available to download here:

GODAN Success Stories Issue 1

http://www.godan.info/documents/godan-success-stories-issue-2

Amparo Ballivian
Amparo BallivianWorld BankUnited States of America

I agree with Chipo's post. In my answer of last week I sent links to a variety of other publications showing impact of Open Data for agriculture and nutrition. All of them show positive impact. I have not heard of a single example of damages of Open Data for agriculture and nutrition. There are few negative impacts in other sectors, when realted to personally identifiable information that is not anonymized. But since most Open Data is not personal, this has not been a big issue.

 

I am nt an expert in ICT, so I prefer not to commetn on that.

Simone Sala
Simone SalaFAOItaly

Dear all,
let me try to break the ice by playing the devil's advocate role and focus on the negative side of open/big data.

In a world of power asymmetries it is rather obvious that the strongest/richest organizations are going to benefit first and foremost of open datasets. Technology - every technology- has historically been uptaken by the elite first, so I don't see how this could be different with data. :)

On one hand this means that big companies would be able to create services out of data through which better monitor crop production (and related dynamics) to gain market insights that may strenghten their bargaining position with smallholders when it comes to buying their produce. 

On the other hand, there are already organizations proposing to farmers to share their data in exchange of services. Data can thus become a bargaining chip for farmers to receive some forms of technical advice/assistance or to access to credit/markets. This is the case of NGO like this one or companies like GroVentures and FitUganda.

I think we will see this kind of business models mushrooming over and over in the future. The question is how do we help governments regulate this environment and how do we strengthen (smallholder) farmers' capacities in order to be able to better leverage this asset. Personally I am particularly interested to learn more by the experience of some farmers' organizations (such as the East African Farmers Organization's eGranary project) in managing their own data could be the best way forward.