In 2019, seven sessions of Digital Innovation Dialogue were organized by CIO with more than a total of 400 people participating. The 8th session is on Farmer Digital Identity and Data Ownership and is the first Digital Innovation Dialogue in 2020. This Dialogue covers two important topics: (i) Farmer Digital Identity and (ii) Farmers' Data ownership, with a particular focus on smallholder farmers. Digital inclusion of farmers is a strong instrument to combat ‘digital divide’ in agriculture and benefit rural farmers . Digital identity is a pathway to financial inclusion, index based agriculture, markets and digital agricultural advisory services.

Farmer Digital Identity

Any attempt to apply digitization to agriculture will raise eventually the question on how to relate with the identity of the farmer. This Dialogue will first discuss the following questions:
• Why would we want to give all smallholder farmers a digital identity?
• What are the costs and benefits?
• Who would be the digital identity provider?

Data ownership

Social networks made mistakes by compromising the data of their users, indicating there is still a long way to go. Certainly, we do not want to repeat the same mistakes in agriculture. We need to respect and protect the ownership of user's data. This starts with the identity data, followed by the farm business data. This Dialogue will then discuss the following questions:

• How to understand data ownership in the agriculture sector?
• What is the value of this data?
• How to protect farmers’ ownership over the data?
• How does blockchain fit into this context and what are the key legal challenges?