The "APEC Wisdom Agriculture development and application workshop" was held successfully from Nov. 23 to 25 in Yinchuan, Ningxia (China). The workshop invited more than 120 experts and scholars from 8 APEC economies, 5 Observing countries, 5 international organization and different provinces in China. Experts from Greece, Korea, Spain, and Canada gave wonderful speeches on wisdom agriculture, precision agriculture, internet & agriculture, and agricultural product traceability. Chinese experts gave speeches on wisdom plant, precision forest, wisdom animal husbandry, crop modelling and wisdom orchard respectively. Experts from different economies showed the research and application progress in their economies, exchanged information on the advanced technologies and achievements.
The workshop has yielded a series of achievements, mainly along four points.
1. Create an APEC wisdom agriculture cooperation network, build a communication and exchange platform for experts. The information and technologies have been commonly applied in agriculture, and wisdom agriculture has gotten more attention from APEC and other regions in the world. The economies and regions faced some common problems regarding wisdom agriculture and there exist also some differences in wisdom agriculture development and application due to regional variations. The creation of an APEC wisdom agriculture network can help share information, integrate and optimize resources, and promote cooperation and communication.
2. Strengthen long-term project cooperation in wisdom agriculture for APEC regions.
The APEC wisdom agriculture workshop can build bridges for researchers and organizations in APEC and other regions in the world, strengthen related cooperation. It also can help apply funds and projects for wisdom agriculture in APEC regions, collectively carry out research in wisdom agriculture, and push the development and application of wisdom agriculture in APEC and other regions.
3. Create expert database, and promoting multilateral cooperation.
An expert database in wisdom agriculture can collect the related information of agricultural experts to supply support and help for the researchers in wisdom agriculture while strengthening multilateral cooperation in different APEC regions.
4. Promote the research level and application ability of related researchers in wisdom agriculture.
The workshop invited international leading experts in wisdom agriculture to give presentations on the internet of things, big data, intelligent agent, the agricultural product traceability system, the plant growth model, digital orchard, and presented good international application cases of wisdom agriculture in different APEC economies. The workshop supplied advanced knowledge on technologies, helped share good cases, and promoted the research level and application ability of related researchers.
In order to expand the influence of the workshop, this online discussion was held to allow experts from across the world to exchange on wisdom agriculture. This discussion has been very successful in debating some crucial questions and for collecting examples from around the world.
On behalf of agriculture information institute of CAAS, I thank the staff from FAO responsible for the online discussion, thank Dr. Bi for her support, thank YPARD for joining the discussion actively, thank the colleagues from the Agriculture Information Institute of CAAS for their help, thank our partners from Ningxia Foreign Affairs Office and finally and especially thank Mr. Max Blanck for his hard and careful work. I appreciate you all for what you have done for the on-line discussion, without which it would not have achieved success.
Mme Xiuming Guo