Kabul – Agriculture is increasingly knowledge-intensive as the sector faces many challenges posed by climate change, loss of biodiversity, drought, desertification, increase in food prices and inefficient supply chains. There is a continuing need to provide the right information to the people who need to make the decisions that make the difference to livelihoods and sustainability.

With the validation of the Afghanistan E-agriculture strategy, Afghanistan joins a handful of countries worldwide in having taken a systematic approach to identifying, developing and implementing information and communication technologies (ICTs) based solutions and services for agriculture.

The Afghanistan E-agriculture Strategy is multi-stakeholder exercise and is led by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) together with the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology.  Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) provided technical assistance together with other key stakeholders in designing the strategy.

Mr. Hamdullah Hamdard Acting Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Livestock of MAIL in his opening remarks said, “E-Agriculture Strategy will help us to find solutions for several problems in the agriculture sector. 1) Security, MAIL employees cannot go to the insecure areas. 2) Afghanistan geographical mountainous structure, people live far from cities in remote villages between the mountains. 3) Infrastructure, such as lack of roads and bridges as well as lack of staff on district level makes it more difficult to reach out to all farmer communities in the country.” 

E-agriculture strategies would also help to rationalize resources (financial and human) and address holistically, the ICT opportunities and challenges for the agricultural sector in a more efficient manner while generating new revenue streams and improve the livelihoods of the rural community as well as ensure the goals of the national agriculture master plan are achieved.

The validation workshop is conducted from 11-14 March 2018 and is being attended by about 74 participants from the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL), Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MICT), United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and Afghanistan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (ATRA) with the Technical Support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), under the On Farm Water Management project of the MAIL.

Related links:

The E-agriculture Strategy Guide http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5564e.pdf  

The E-agriculture Strategy Guide – a summary http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6909e.pdf 

The brochure for E-agriculture Strategy http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5448e.pdf