Agriculture is in dire need of transformative change in order to address challenges such as ensuring food security and nutrition, contributing to inclusive growth, and managing natural resources sustainably. Digital technologies have the potential to harness, accelerate, and scale up innovative methods of enormous positive impact on food and agriculture. Digitalization can make food systems more productive and contribute better to all dimensions of sustainable development – economic, environmental, and social. At the same time, digital technologies can be profoundly transformative and can entail challenges and risks that would require policymakers to address.

Recognizing the importance of digitalization in food and agriculture, FAO is convening a high-level dialogue on the establishment of the International Platform for Digital Food and Agriculture with a panel of stakeholders including policymakers, farmers’ representatives, senior managers of agri-businesses and digital technology companies to discuss the opportunities, challenges, and risks associated with the digitalization in food and agriculture.

The establishment of the International Platform for Digital Food and Agriculture aims to provide a voluntary and inclusive multi-stakeholder mechanism to facilitate discussions on how to strengthen the potential of digital technology applications in food and agriculture and how to address the related challenges. The High-level dialogue will provide a setting to discuss the role of such a multi-stakeholder forum and its opportunities in contributing to the adoption of safe, sustainable, trustworthy, and human rights-based digital technologies in food and agriculture.

The event will be webcast live.

Simultaneous interpretation will be available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.