Plant Protection
As an African I am so anxious with the establishment of the International Digital Council for Food and Agriculture. For a long time information gap between developed and developing countries has been to the disadvantage of developing countries. Because internet has no borders it is my hope that this Council will foster information sharing which will reduce information gap between countries. I am sure one day the whole world will sing the same song in addressing issues of food and agriculture. It is at that time then agricultural service providers, producers, processors and consumer will share data that will enable every partner to benefit from the sector without causing harm to another.
Potential entry points for government to address challenges and foster the development of digital agriculture:
Nowdays agricultural services and input can and are acquired from other countries. Digital agriculture should focus to act across borders. To do that the Council should be designed in a way that harmonises guidelines from different countries and come up with common entry points that fit in different countries.
Sr. Hamad Lyimo
Near-real-time monitoring of food crisis risk factors for improved early warning early action
In the recent decades several approaches have been employed in early warning systems with the aim of improving the quality of information that reach the tables of policy makers. The continuing thrives toward more advances real time early warning systems is a manifestation that policy designed to tackle food security crisis are far from being satisfactory. This does not mean those policies do not work, but rather they lead to designing interventions that do not perpendicularly address the crisis or influence implementation of a good intervention towards poor results. In a crisis event the time period between occurrence of the crisis and interference intervention to absorb its effects to livelihood is crucial. Even a good intervention that is implemented weeks after the crisis may seem as no intervention at all. Thus real time early warning system is an important input to effective policy decision that will lead to timed intervention.
Designing a quality real time early warning system should focus first on integrating a number of sub systems that provide information which when analyzed give the meaning we need to fully understand the crisis. Unfortunately, food insecurity crisis can emanate from an array of origins from failure of a crop due to drought, floods, plant diseases, post harvest losses, political instability, trade difficulties and health to decision making in the household like food preparation and distribution among family members. Thus a good system has to combine data from all these sources and allow selection of the best intervention option. For preventative policy response such a system should be able to provide early signs that a crisis is coming. Early signs can be for example a spike in under five malnutrition, signs of a pest/disease outbreak etc. Fortunately, these subsystems are available but work independently in different departments in most countries.
Preparedness to emergency food aids, disease outbreaks, evacuations are policy responses that have shown success when guided by weather monitoring tools. In many countries there are national disaster committees that constantly receive weather updates and interpret into policy response that avert food crisis and save lives.
Local food prices are one way to get a temperature check of local market conditions, but high frequency local market price data is not widely available because of geographical discrepancies and communication endowments. In real time monitoring this gap is likely to widen if internet use will not be promoted up to the local level. Fortunately internet use need less effort to promote as it has been accepted easily to its multiple use. Policy concern is needed to address literacy in local areas as this can limit sharing of market information via internet.
Advances in early warning technologies and data must be matched by developing capacity within institutions at the country and regional level to transform relevant data into preventative actions. Promoting use of internet, developing easy to use electronic monitoring platforms, institutional capacity building and making efforts to link several platforms into a common backbone is needed in order to scale up the use of real-time monitoring in early warning early action systems by regional organizations, national governments, and other country level institutions. This requires government willingness to invest in building technical capacity of the people to develop and run such systems effectively.
As noted earlier, an effective real time monitoring system is the one that incorporate outputs from several other subsystems and allow interpretation of data that will give logic to a phenomena. To have such a system collaboration of organizations with interest in early warning is important to remove flaws that are inherent in one system.