Thank you all for your very interesting and valuable contributions during these three days of consultation. 

When thinking of next steps, we are talking abouy the process. Today some participants have identified very important steps of the process and yesterday when discussing about the long term ethical, legal and policy changes needed to move from the current scenario to the desired scenarios, Simone shared the process followed by the IoT pilot in Europe.

Some of these contributions mentioned:

• The need to identify national, regional and international key players (including private and public sector, smallholder farmers, ICT experts, data science experts)
• Bring all stakeholders, including smallholder farmers organizations to the table for an open dialogue 
• Consult stakeholders, particularly smallholder farmers, about the needs to ensure smallholder farmers benefit from agricutural data in the future
• Develop an assessment of the situation in a certain country or countries in specific situations
• Develop a certain number of case studies from which we could identify lessons learned, best practices, gaps and needs
• Identify and implement capacity building activities for smallholder farmers to harness their participation in decision making 

G. Kruseman mentioned the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture which aims to harness the capabilities of big data to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in low and middle-income countries. I would like to ask him if they developed a consultation with smallholder farmers about their needs and if there has been any evaluation about the impact of such Platform to improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Do you have any lesson learned or good practice that could be helpful for our discussion on how to ensure smallholder farmers benefit from agricultural data in the future? Also in terms of process and next steps? How would you see this process adding value to the CGIAR work in relation to the Platform for Big Data?

Perhaps when thinking on how success should look like, it is relevant to identify the ethical principles that are the basis of the new escenarios we are looking for.

For me, one of the basic ones is equity. Yesterday one participant talked about the existing asymetry between farmers and agrobusiness. For sure, there is inequality when we talk about accessing and using agricutural data. Promotion and protection for the generation,  flow, exchange and use of data and knolwedge is different if we are talking about data or information by smallholder farmers or agrobusiness. The lack of equity comes because of the lack of value society gives to the different types of data and knowledge. Science and modern technologies seems to be better valued than traditional knowledge, innovations and practices.

How to reach a success scenario where these two sectors (the formal and informal) could trust each other, recognize each other and co-exist? How to strengthen the joint collaboration between them to achieve major global goals such as food security, human health, poverty reduction, empowerment of vulnerable stakeholders, conservation of our environment, and other major collective precepts which should be the metrics for agriculture and food systems?

I agree that raising awareness and capacity building is needed. I also agree that recognizing the role of smallholder farmers and their contributions in generating, exchanging and making available data/information for further knowledge generation is important. But we also need to establish multi-stakeholder platforms where different stakeholders have a voice, particularly farmers, and we start building channels of communication and trust between them, where we stop talking among ourselves and start talking and understanding others needs, points of view, values and challenges. 

Hello to everybody. My name is Juanita Chaves and as another moderator of this e-consultation I am very happy and impressed of the active participation and very good comments, ideas and arguments you have all contributed since yesterday. I encourage you to continue this dialogue and exchange of ideas on legal, policy and ethical inter-linked aspects of open data affecting smallholder farmers.