Digital technologies for food markets

Digital technologies can help markets function better and improve farmers’ access to them. They can also be leveraged to address multiple market failures and facilitate smallholder farmers’ integration in markets and value chains. Digital technologies can promote international trade and effectively improve market‐based institutional arrangements for contributing to all three dimensions of sustainability. At the same time, digital technologies can be profoundly transformative and entail challenges and risks that would require policymakers’ action.

Digital technologies have the potential to harness, accelerate, and scale up innovative methods of enormous positive impact on food and agriculture. However, as agriculture becomes data‑driven, the use of digital technology, such as for Big Data and applications of Artificial Intelligence, may have a significant impact on farm management but could also affect markets. In the long term, digital technologies could also affect farm structures and agricultural labour, bringing about both economic and social change in the sector.